Category: Free speech

Apple’s heavy-handed approach to speech

I’m trolling for Boston-area stories about Apple’s heavy-handed approach to allowing and banning apps for the iPhone, the iPod Touch and now, of course, the iPad. If you know of any, please pass them along. I would love nothing more than to give Steve Jobs a Muzzle Award, but I need a local angle.

What prompts my request is this outrageous example involving newly minuted Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore, who was unable to get his app approved because his work “ridicules public figures.”

I’ll be in the market for a new phone in the summer of 2011. It’s looking less and less likely that I’ll be going with Apple, much as I love its technology.

J.D. Salinger’s battle against free expression

J.D. Salinger, who died Wednesday at the age of 91, spent the last year of his life waging a wrong-headed battle against the fair-use exemption to copyright law, which allows for the use of copyrighted materials without permission under certain limited circumstances.

A Swedish humorist who goes by the name of J.D. California wrote a sequel to Salinger’s most famous work, “The Catcher in the Rye,” called “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.” Salinger sued for copyright violation, even though parody is protected by fair use.

Last summer I gave Salinger a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for this outrage against free speech. I am, of course, under no illusions that Salinger ever knew or cared. What’s more disturbing is that the courts held up publication of “60 Years Later,” and that the case is still pending.

Let’s hope Salinger’s heirs drop the suit.

Another distinguished nominee

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley throws her hat in the ring for a coveted 2010 Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award.

The Boston Herald keeps pounding away on Coakley’s absurd claim that she’s legally prohibited from talking about her campaign when she’s on state business — or even when she’s in the Statehouse.

It’s bad enough that she’d muzzle herself. But if she really believes what she’s saying, then she would muzzle others as well.