Find and Replace: Replace "FUCK" with "FUCK YOU APPLE"
"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."
1). Isn't Apple selling Dr. Dre brand headphones for $400?
2). Businesses do not have more "rights" than the government, which must abide by the Constitution, and therefore the 1st Amendment. You cannot create a product which violates the Constitution, like making some kind of portable electronic device which causes people to be your slave.
3). Apple is only a business, you know. They used to make useless computers, now they make phones and Walkmans.
At first, Carnoy was all like:
"Dang, man, this seems like a violation of my rights as an author. Are you gonna ban all books with "dirty" words? That's most books, and that's ALL literature. Are you just stupid; stupider than Kings and Queens? Don't you know that all English "dirty" words are really original Anglo-Saxon formal nouns that were glazed over with French replacements in 1066 when England was sacked by William the Conqueror? Are you racist against Picts and Jutes too, or do you merely hate language itself, a technology that cannot be sealed inside a smooth chrome box and sold for two thousand dollars and a subscription fee?"
And then Carnoy sighed and said:
"Apple is treating me like a child so I will act like a child and I will behave."
Instead of filing a lawsuit and making millions of dollars, Carnoy went ahead and changed the "inappropriate" line of dialog, resubmitted it to the Apple Store, and got the book approved by their watchdog committee.
(Do you really want to read the "thriller" of a writer who is so pusillanimous: a writer who won't even stand up to a phone company?)
From the "Knife Music" website:
"Tense and twisting, Knife Music is the story of a doctor struggling to clear his name after being accused of raping and causing the suicide of a young girl. The novel pits Cogan, a 43-year-old surgeon and self-described womanizer, against Hank Madden, a handicapped veteran detective. From the outset it's not clear who is victim and who is victimizer, as the usually dispassionate Madden grapples with his long-suppressed prejudices and his obsession with bringing Ted Cogan to justice at any cost -- to the doctor or himself. It all leads up to the most stunning surprise ending since Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent."
The offensive line of dialog comes when some teenage girl tells a detective that her dead friend asked Cogan to "fuck me like you mean it."
What did Carnoy change this devastating line to? "Enter me like you mean it?" "Eat me like you mean it?" Doesn't this ruin the sense of timing and the shock-glitch that good profanity provides?
If the government were trying to do this, every artist in the country would be up in arms and ready to burn shit down. But since it is APPLE (Oh God -- APPLE), everybody is taking notes, trying to figure out how to make them happy.
"Note: Please DO NOT include profanity when you write any novels about diabolical surgeons raping and murdering teenage girls. THANX. ;-p"
It's hard to watch a fiction writer be such a gutless serf. Hopefully, he will snap out of it and remember his roots.
If Apple picks a fight with literature, literature will destroy them like it has destroyed every other culture, ideology, country, or tyrant who has tried to control it. Literature only looks like it is sleeping. Literature is sleep itself, and its teeth and claws are dreams, time, and perspective. If Apple picks this fight, literature will wait for Apple to die, and then it will write the epitaph, and it will be fucking ugly, fucking funny, and most of all, motherfucking sad.
Names will be named. iNames will be iNamed.
Posted by miracle on Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:47:30 -0500 -- permanent link
