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...s languages. (The military dictatorship of that country also required modems to be licensed, so residents of Burma, like NetNanny users, are not likely to see this page.) Distributing Bibles, along with other forms of proselytizing by non-Muslims, is also banned in Saudi Arabia, according to this State Department report. (And possibly even possession; an email correspondent tells me that a sign at a Saudi Arabian airport customs stated that arriving travelers should surrender their non-approved religious books to officials before entering the country.) Some governments still tightly control religious organizations and their publications. In 1999, the government of China banned the Falun Gong sect and confiscated and destroyed books by their founder and other Falun Gong books. As you can see, the books live on over the Internet-- at least in places that don't censor incoming Net data. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was the object of numerous obscenity trials in both the UK and the United States up into the 1960s. E for Ecstasy, a book on the drug MDMA, was seized by Australian customs in 1994, and at last check (May 2000), the official ban on the book was still in force in that country. (An Australian goverment site has a PDF document on what kinds of books are banned or restricted in Australia. You can also search the database of banned or restricted materials yourself.) In the 1999-2000 session, the US Congress quietly slipped similar bans for "dangerous" information on drugs and explosives into various bills. The Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999 (S. 1428) had a section 9 outlawing certain dissemination of information on drug use, patterned after a law outlawing certain dissemination on information on explosives that was signed in 1999. Given that conspiracy or solicitation to commit federal crimes was already illegal, it's hard to see what practical effect is intended by these bills other than to censor the open dissemination of information deemed too dangerous for the public to learn. The anti-drug-information bill didn't make it to a full vote last session, and E For Ecstasy is still legal in the US, for now. A number of democratic countries, including Austria, France, Germany, and Canada, have criminalized various forms of "hate speech", including books judged to disparage minority groups. In the 1980s, Ernst Zündel was convicted twice under Canada's "false news" laws for publishing Did Six Million Really Die?, a 1974 book denying the Holocaust. On appeal, the Canadian Supreme Court found the "false news" law unconstitutional in 1992, but Zündel is now being prosecuted under Canada's "Human Rights Act" for publishing this book and other material on his Zundelsite. Even so, Deborah Lipstadt and some other prominent critics of Holocaust deniers have gone on record as opposing laws that would censor such speech. (On the other hand, Zündel is quite happy to call for bans for works he doesn't like, though, as seen in this leaflet calling for a ban of Schindler's List. And denier David Irving's attempt to stop publication of Lipstadt's book on Holocaust denial, as seen in the complaint reproduced on Irving's web site, failed when a UK court ruled that Lipstadt's statements about Irving were, in fact, justified.) Unfit for Schools and Minors? The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear. The teacher's school board had pulled the books from class reading lists, citing "adult language" and references to sex and violence. Many students and parents protested the school's board's policy, which also included the outright banning of three other books. Shakespeare is no stranger to censorship: the Associated Press reported in March 1996 that Merrimack, NH schools had pulled Shakespeare's Twelfth Night from the curriculum after the school board passed a "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction" act. (Twelfth Night includes a number of romantic entanglements including a young woman who disguises herself as a boy.) Readers from Merrimack informed me in 1999 that school board members who had passed the act had been voted out, after the uproar resulting from the act's passage, and that the play is now used again in Merrimack classrooms. Govind has a page with more information about the censorship of Shakespeare through history. John T. Scopes was convicted in 1925 of teaching the evolutionary theory of Darwin's Origin of Species in his high school class. (For more about this famous trial, see this site by Doug Linder.) The Tennessee law prohibiting teaching evolution theory was finally repealed in 1967, but further laws intended to stifle the teaching of evolution in science classes have been proposed in the Tennesee legislature as recently as 1996. An illustrated edition of "Little Red Riding Hood" was banned in two California school districts in 1989. Following the Little Red-Cap story from Grimm's Fairy Tales, the book shows the heroine taking food and wine to her grandmother. The school districts cited concerns about the use of alcohol in the story. In Mark Twain's lifetime, his books Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were excluded from the juvenile sections of the Brooklyn Public library (among other libraries), and banned from the library in Concord, MA, home of Henry Thoreau. In recent years, some high schools have dropped Huckleberry Finn from their reading lists, or have been sued by parents who want the book dropped. In Tempe, Arizona, a parent's lawsuit that attempted to get the local high school to remove the book from a required reading list went as far as a federal appeals court in 1998. (The court's decision in the case, which affirmed Tempe High's right to teach the book, has some interesting comments about education and racial tensions.) The Tempe suit, and other recent incidents, have often been concerned with the use of the word "nigger", a word that also got Uncle Tom's Cabin challenged in Waukegan, Illinois. For a comprehensive web site describing attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn and other Twain works, see the site Huckleberry Finn Debated, by Jim Zwick. Many "classics" (and their authors) were regarded as scandalous when they were first published, but after the author was safely dead they were relegated to high school English classes and largely forgotten by most people. However, in 1978 the Anaheim (California) Union High School District woke up to the danger of George Eliot's Silas Marner and banned it. I would be gratified (and not at all surprised) if there was a sudden surge of interest in Eliot among Anaheim students afterwards. Also banned there, according to the Anaheim Secondary Teachers Assocation, and as reported in Dawn Soya's Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, was Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, for its depiction of the behavior of Scarlett O'Hara and the freed slaves in the novel. (While Mitchell may no longer be living, though, her copyright lives on in the US, so Americans will have to read a print copy instead of the online version.) John Locke's philosophical Essay Concerning Human Understanding was expressly forbidden to be taught at Oxford University in 1701. The French translation was also placed on the Index. Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice was banned from classrooms in Midland, Michigan in 1980, due to its portrayal of the Jewish character Shylock. It has been similarly banned in the past in Buffalo and Manchester, NY. Shakespeare's plays have also often been "cleansed" of crude words and phrases. Thomas Bowdler's efforts in his 1818 "Family Shakespeare" gave rise to the word "bowdlerize". Bowdlerism still exists today, but nowadays cleaning up sexual references is waning in popularity, and cleaning up racial references is growing in popularity. Case in point: This version of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, from the 1960s, was silently "cleaned up" from the 1920 original, in which Polynesia the parrot occasionally used some impolite terms to refer to blacks. In 1988, after the book had fallen from favor enough to have dropped out of print, the publishers issued a new edition that removed nearly all references to race from the book (and cut out a plotline involving Prince Bumpo's desire to become white). In contrast, the Newbery-winning Voyages of Dr. Dolittle has been available in its original form (impolite words and all) for a long time, in part because the Newbery awarders forbade their medal to be displayed on altered texts. Similar concerns about the handling of race apparently caused The Story of Little Black Sambo to be banned from Toronto public schools in 1956, according to a book by Daniel Braithwaite. (Much of the fuss over Sambo has been over the illustrations rather than the text; some illustrations from various editions can be found here.) Is The Bible banned in US public schools? Some claim it is, though most of the claims I've received in email have either not contained specifics or referred to cases that weren't bans, but instead cases where a state school had to stop advocacy or special treatment favoring the religious messages of the Bible. (Such preferential treatment by state-run schools conflicts with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.) However, sometimes schools may err in the other direction, restricting student's individual speech because of its religious nature (in conflict with the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment). In New Jersey, for instance, a student selected by his teacher to choose a story to read to the class was told that he could not read the story he chose, once he announced that he had chosen the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau. Earlier, the school had also removed from display a poster he had drawn as a Thanksgiving assignment, where he depicted being thankful for Jesus. In August 2000, as reported in a an AP article at Freedom Forum, a federal appeals court came to a split decision in a lawsuit raised on these issues. The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the student's family on the story-reading incident. More Censorship Information This exhibit only represents books that are available online. The best comprehensive review of censorship through history that I have seen online is The File Room exhibit, begun at the University of Illinois, particularly its literature section. (The exhibit originally dates from 1994, and was offline for a while, but is now back on the Internet.) The Digital Freedom Network is an archive that publishes current writings of people who have been censored by their governments. You can read there what oppressive regimes are trying to censor right now. PEN, an international group of writers, keeps track of censorship and oppression of writers worldwide. Their US and Canadian sites are good starting points for current information on censored writers. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law passed by the US Congress in 1998, has several provisions that attempt to prevent people from circumventing access control schemes used for digital works. Such access controls can impair or prevent fair use, and the law itself now threatens free speech as well. For example: In August 2000, a federal judge in New York issued a ruling (available with commentary at OpenLaw and elsewhere) that probibited defendants in a movie-industry lawsuit from even linking to computer code for undoing encryption of DVDs, because of concerns that the code could be used to pirate the discs. Judge Kaplan decided to discount testimony that computer code was protected speech from computer scientist Dave Touretzky of CMU (whose runs a web site with exhibits of various expressions of the source code.) Instead, the judge likening a possessor of the code as being infected with a disease that must be controlled. The judge also discounted concerns that the prohibition on circumventing encryption in the DMCA impairs fair use of materials except in ways that a publisher decides to allow. Fair use, even without consent of a copyright holder, has long been an essential means of preserving free speech in copyright law. An appeal is now underway. In September 2000, a recording industry group issued a challenge to break its new "secure" digital music systems. A Princeton-based research group took them up on it, and succeeded. But when the researchers wrote a paper describing how they did it, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent them a letter threatening them with legal action if they published their results. The letter caused the investigators to withdraw their paper from an academic conference, and engaged the Electronic Frontier Foundation to file suit to confirm their First Amendment right to freely publish their research. (The RIAA now claims they didn't really mean to sue the researchers, and the suit was dismissed.) The group's research was finally published in August 2001, though an early draft of the paper had previously leaked onto the Internet. In July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI after delivering a lecture describing the weaknesses of "e-book" access control systems. The arrest was made at the request of Adobe, which sells some of the access control systems that were demonstrated to be flawed in Sklyarov's talk. Sklyarov was charged with distributing a program he had written in Russia that a reader could use for disabling some of these access controls for Adobe-formatted "ebooks" after they had bought them. This article from EFF describes some of the free speech a...