Tag: Feelings | SpinSafe

While China-bashing is all the rage right now (much of it deserved given the country’s abhorrent human rights practices), it’s sort of amazing what a difference a year makes. While the current focus of ire towards the Chinese government seems focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and a few mobile dance apps, never mind the fully embedded nature of Chinese-manufactured technology in use every day in the West, late 2019 was all about China’s translucent skin. Much of that had to do with China’s inching towards a slow takeover of Hong Kong and how several corporate interests in the West reacted to it. Does anyone else remember when our discussion about China was dominated by stories dealing with Blizzard banning Hearthstone players for supporting Hong Kong and American professional sports leagues looking like cowards in the face of a huge economic market?

Yeah, me neither. But with all that is going on the world and all of the criticism, deserved or otherwise, being lobbed at the Chinese government, it’s worth pointing out that the problems of last year are still going on. And, while Google most recently took something of a stand against the aggression on Hong Kong specifically, other companies are still bowing to China’s thin-skin in heavy-handed ways. The latest example of this is an admittedly relatively trivial attempt by Activision to kneel at the altar of Chinese historical censorship.

The debut trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has been blocked in China, and subsequently edited everywhere else, after featuring around one second’s worth of footage from the Communist government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. When the game was first announced last week, a trailer running for 2:02 was released to the world and hosted on the official Call of Duty and Xbox YouTube pages, along with major trailer sites like IGN and Gamespot.

On August 21, however, the videos on Call of Duty and Xbox’s YouTube pages were replaced with a much shorter, 1:00 version. This isn’t an additional trailer, it’s a replacement, which we know because…the original 2:02 video we embedded in our own story is no longer working, having been marked as “private”.

So here’s the, ahem, tik-tok on this. Activision, which also owns Blizzard, releases a new trailer for a new Call of Duty game. That trailer includes a single second of an image from Chinese protests against the government from three decades ago. The Chinese government, true to form, flips the fuck out and bans the trailer entirely. One imagines there were also threats of banning the game entirely, but that is yet to be confirmed. Activision then, seeing the Chinese government go full carpet bomb over the trailer in its country, decides to try to out-carpet-bomb the carpet bomb by doing a delete/replace of the offending trailer worldwide.

While we’re talking about a mere video game trailer here, the implications aren’t as insignificant as they might seem. Games are a subset of culture and commerce. While much of the discourse over how companies do business in China is overstated to say the least, what Activision did here is something different. Indeed, it could probably be best summarized as: Activision allowed the Chinese government to censor the company’s art throughout the world.

And, sinophobia aside, that is a very dangerous precedent to set. That it was an action taken on a trailer for a game called Call of Duty: Cold War, in fact, is probably proof that the universe is not without a sense of irony.

Techdirt.

The brave new path to a gatekeeper-manned, non-open internet the EU recently cut with its plainly atrocious new copyright directive was, were you to believe the general media coverage, cheered on by EU artists as a blow to Google and a boon to art because… well, nobody can actually explain that last part. And that’s likely because the proposed new legislation, Article 11 and Article 13, essentially forces internet platforms to play total copyright cops or be liable for infringement while gutting the fair use type allowances that had previously been in place. Much of the European legislation that existed on the national level, and which served as the basis for this continental legislation, has done absolutely zero to provide artists or journalists any additional income. Instead, it’s re-entrenched legacy gatekeepers and essentially created a legal prohibition on innovation. As the directive goes through its final stages for adoption by EU member states, the general coverage has repeated the line that artists and creators are cheering this on.

But, despite the media coverage, it isn’t true that all of the artistic world is blind to exactly what was just done to the internet and the wider culture. Destructive Creation — a collection of artists most famous for taking a monument in Europe to Soviet soldiers and painting them all as western superheroes and cultural icons — has made its latest work an addition to a statue of Johannes Gutenberg.

“Let there be light”, reads the cover of the Bible held by the bronze hands of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the modern printing press, on the famous statue in Place Gutenberg in Strasbourg, France. Last weekend, however, the monument received a curious addition. A dazzling red sign reads CENSORED above a caption that reads “Art. 13”.

A member of Bulgarian art collective, Destructive Creation, which was behind the artistic action, defended the stunt.

“Under the proposed regulations, if Gutenberg was doing now what he was doing in the 15th century, he would be sued for using content that does not belong to him – the Bible, which he reprinted – and would have been censored,” the artist told BIRN.

And here is their work upon the statue.

As far as making points goes, slapping the law you believe will censor art on the bible being held by the man that brought mass printing to Europe certainly is on the nose. But the actual important factor in this is that this wasn’t Silicon Valley tech shareholders that defaced the statue in the name of saving art and culture, but a group of artists. These are the exact people who, were you to listen to proponents of the new copyright law, would be on their knees thanking their gracious overlords. Instead, Destructive Creation knows exactly where this is all going to lead and it most certainly isn’t going to be to an EU where artists have more opportunities to make, share, and sell their art. Instead, the law will chill permissive sharing by artists, not to mention individuals and companies that want to build new and innovative platforms to help art reach the public, all under the threat of massive liability that practically mandates platforms disallow user-generated content.

You know, what the internet has essentially always been until this EU bill has decided to kill it.

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Tag Archive for: Feelings

Activision Deletes And Replaces ‘Call Of Duty’ Trailer Worldwide Over 1 Second That Hurt China’s Feelings