At last, some good news in publishing this week: PayPal has
backed off its pressure on Smashwords over erotica. Previously they had threatened to pull functionality from Smashwords if they continued to sell certain
kinds of erotica, or refuse to process payments related to those works.
According to Smahwords-boss Mark Coker on their blog, PayPal will not segregate against any form of legal fiction.
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| Even if your way is with a St. Bernard. |
Coker bravely and wisely aired this topic on the net for
weeks. The official Smashwords blog became a chronicle of every development in
his struggle with PayPal, letting people know in detail the censorship that was
at risk and changes of people’s favor. Generous to his clientele, Coker credits
activists and authors who spread the issue’s prominence with convincing PayPal
to back down. I suspect there’s more to it, though, and would pretty happily buy
a book on how negotiations went up to this settlement. We can’t undervalue the
tactics and appeals that work in convincing independent bodies about issues
like censorship.
This is an important precedent, for if Coker really
negotiated with the biggest electronic-era payment service to not press moral
issues like this, then operators of smaller services will be less likely to
challenge publishers, since they have less a chance of winning, and additional
chances of simply forking business over to a bigger competitor.
One still marks the grim flipside: that PayPal’s operators ought
to have the right to choose what transactions they facilitate. By “winning” and
coercing them to continue services, Smashwords has won for the rights of authors,
but hopefully not discouraged the rights of business owners. I’m inclined to
overlook this because PayPal’s operators were convinced of their own will –
though for anything more specific, again, we might need a journalist to write
us a book.
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| Dana Carvey does not necessarily endorse "Daddy" incest-porn. |
Paul Biba and other bloggers complained of our cultural
double-standard, some mistakenly thinking it merely Puritanical. It’s not. It doesn't take Church Lady to be grossed out by rape-porn, and anthropology and ethnology have revealed that
hunter-gatherers killed in public and rutted in private. The different handling
of sexuality and violence is as old as society. Of course it keeps showing up,
especially when we broach fringe issues, which encompassed all of PayPal’s
targets.
To some degree this was about double-standards, but in a vital
way it wasn’t: liberty of fiction is an All-or-Nothing game. Either authors are
allowed to write fiction about anything, or they’re not. Either the right
exists or it doesn’t. It’s that terrifyingly simple. Either you can write
incestual smut, or you don’t actually have freedom of expression – just
temporary allowances based on the tastes of others.
There’s never been a year in my adult life when I haven’t
thrown a book across the room, but I’d never ban their publication. Seeing the
markets support that notion is heartening. Sometimes, especially with recent
motions of the Big Six, Department of Justice, and Amazon, you can forget the
markets ever move in positive directions.
I am agreeing completely with the thrust of this post, but keep getting sidetracked. What sort of book do you hurl across the room and what is its fate after that?
ReplyDeleteTypically an hour later I go over, dust it off and try reading through it again. Many kinds of books have taken such flight. A particular Sudoku holds the record for most throwings.
DeleteYou're right - it is all or nothing, because who would define the line every time?
ReplyDeleteSo, I just added another downfall to owning a book on Kindle vs. Paperback, which is 'the inability to throw a book across the room.' ; )
I still don't buy this idea that a payment service company can refuse to handle payments for goods or services it disapproves of *after it has agreed to be a payment service provider for a company* -- unless, as the new agreement stipulates, the good or service is illegal to begin with.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't like a rare books shop owner refusing to sell a teenager a Harlan Ellison first edition because he believes the kids won't appreciate it, or even like a pharmacist refusing to sell condoms to a twelve-year-old. PayPal is a *payment service*. They facilitate transactions between sellers and buyers. Within those transactions they don't buy or sell anything themselves.
It would be like a bank refusing to let you use your ATM card if you're using a direct debit machine within a known red light district. Never mind that your car broke down and you're trying to pay the tow truck -- they don't approve of where you're spending money, so no moolah for you.
It just doesn't work for me. I can see PayPal having the right to not deal with a business or individual. I can see PayPal having the right to refuse to aid illegal activities. But I cannot see PayPal or any other business having the right to tell a business it deals with what goods and services they can offer *when PayPal is only a payment transaction provider in the exchange of payment for said goods and services*.
Otherwise, it's like the company that provides the ink for paper currency telling the government people can no longer pay cash at strip clubs because the owner of the ink company doesn't approve of such places.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "It just doesn't work for me." It's objectionable behavior, but it's a company that clearly had contractual liberty to make these decisions. If you compare it to the behaviors of banks, there are banks that don't process e-payments to many destinations or retailers, though in recent years they've hustled to fix that because it infringes upon business. I used to have an account with one. I don't anymore because I found it inconvenient, but they had the right to lag - which likely means PayPal had the right to refuse. It's in our best interest to get them to not refuse.
DeletePutting it the way you did made me wonder about refusing to fulfill payment for certain services. If I ran a bank, would I go out of my way to block the purchase of blood diamonds or slaves? Not that the latter are as transparently sold, though they still are even in this country.