App removes profanity from books – is it a good idea?

This is a bit like the CleanFlicks / ClearPlay issue that was a big deal a decade ago, where companies were selling DVD players that would automatically skip over "objectionable" content during playback. Congress passed a law clarifying that this type of activity was not copyright infringement.

Here's Ed Felten commenting on that:

There is nothing here (or elsewhere in the FMA) that says you can only skip the dirty bits. The FMA says that you can skip any portions of the movie you like, as long as the portions you skip are “limited”. You can skip the clean parts if you want, as long as they make up only a limited portion, which may be the case for some movies. If the motion picture has commercials in it, you can skip the commercials. If you don’t like the soccer scenes in “Bend It Like Beckham”, you can watch the movie without them.

The soccer-free version of “Bend It Like Beckham” is speech. The FMA allows that speech to occur, by preventing a copyright owner from suing to block it. And the FMA does this in an ideal way, ensuring that the copyright owner on the original work will be paid for the use of their work. That’s the purpose of the “from an authorized copy” and “no fixed copy” language – to ensure that a valid copy of the original work is needed in order to view the new, modified work.

Let’s review. The FMA prevents no speech. The FMA allows more speech. The FMA prevents private parties from suing to stop speech they don’t like. The FMA is not censorship. The FMA prevents censorship.

From the very brief article OP linked to, it doesn't seem clear whether the app that was mentioned performs an on-the-fly change or actually modifies your stored files, which could have important legal ramifications. But in general I agree with Ed Felten's remarks about DVDs and think that for the most part they apply here as well. With the caveat, of course, that replacing a word with one of "the same general meaning" can potentially be problematic. I suppose I would personally prefer it if a word like "shit" were replaced with "s—t" rather than, say, "poo" or something. But giving someone the option of presenting different words is not censorship.

/r/books Thread Link - csmonitor.com