Starting From Next Year, China Wants Music Services To Vet Every Song Before It Goes Online
from the silence-is-golden dept
Techdirt has reported on so many different aspects of China's online clampdown, that it's natural to wonder if there's anything left to censor. Surprisingly, the answer is "yes", according to this Tech in Asia post:
all Chinese companies operating any sort of internet music or streaming platform will be required to set up internal censorship departments. These departments will have to approve all songs before they're posted online, in strict accordance with the Ministry [of Culture]'s guidelines for permissible song content. Censors will also have to create and maintain a "warning" list and a blacklist for content creators and uploaders whose songs repeatedly fail to pass inspection.
As the article explains, online music companies are expected to bear all the costs of setting up censorship departments and training staff to vet all the songs, and will be punished if they fail to implement the new policy properly. At least some will have had practice, since a similar approach has been applied to online posts for some time. Tech in Asia has the following thoughts on how effective the censorship is likely to be:
The Ministry’s decade-long console ban was very poorly enforced, as have been most of its bans on video games. But online games have been easier for the Ministry to restrict because they typically require China-based servers, and the [Ministry of Culture] might similarly find that it has an easier time genuinely restricting online music than it has policing the offline music.
That seems likely. The real question raised by this latest move is: anything left to censor, or have you finished now, China?
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Filed Under: censorship, china, control, copyright, music, music services, review
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the USA (not China) sets the standard for new forms of censorship
Although anti-war songs were common radio fare in the US during the Vietnam War, during the Iraq War such music was virtually nonexistent, dispite a large public rejection of the war. So what changed? Two factors were that ownership of both the record industry and radio stations have become concentrated in very few hands in recent years. A single company, Clearchannel (owned by a friend of the Bush family) had bought up most radio stations in the country, and had banned even old anti-war hit songs from the 1960s.
Many Americans don't realize it, because there is no official Department of Censorship in the US, that the mainstream media market is in fact tightly controlled -- to the point of de facto censorship-- by a collusion of government and private industry.
China, in contrast, is still doing censorship the old-fashioned way.
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Re: the USA (not China) sets the standard for new forms of censorship
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Re: the USA (not China) sets the standard for new forms of censorship
This has been happening in other industries too. Just today I hear the FTC signed off on the merger for AB & SAB. While beer may not be as prominent as media the concept still exists: we are approaching "count on one hand" numbers for any manufacturing and distribution in the US.
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Re: Re: the USA (not China) sets the standard for new forms of censorship
We may be well past that stage already, and we are now on our way toward the "count on one finger" numbers for companies in most any major industry.
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Re: Re: Re: the USA (not China) sets the standard for new forms of censorship
CPU? Either Intel or AMD.
Graphics card? Nvidia or AMD.
Hard drive? HGST, Seagate or Western Digital.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: the USA (not China) sets the standard for new forms of censorship
Let's not forget that HGST is now owned by Western Digital -- proving your point even more.
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Re: Re: Re: the USA (not China) sets the standard for new forms of censorship
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Please redirect your question
The Ministry of Culture is not the appropriate agency to answer your question.
Please redirect your question to the Ministry of Censorship.
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Let Tim (any of them) write an article about it and you'll get your answer.
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