Clarifying Concerns About Amazon and Media Censorship
- Thread starter Renegade
- Start date
Amazon has been rampant about editing older books and censoring old media on their streaming platforms in recent years. This might not surprise anyone in India as we are accustomed to CBFC 'elfin up movies way before release, but this is slowly becoming the norm of the entire industry. Most recently, they have been under fire for editing older books and updating their Kindle subscription and Kindle device TOS to give them the right to do it "legally" as per their discretion.
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This has been also evident in our own films post release as well, if you compare your old DVD copies of many older Bollywood films to the versions available now on streaming platforms, there are many scenes cut, dialogues beeped and much more. There are countless examples of this if you scour the forums and search for it, I myself have seen this in action when I compared my DVD versions of some old movies with the ones available on streaming. This is a problem for media preservationists and purists like me who enjoy watching art of its time, which is not meant to be updated like a service. Art and by extension media, in my opinion, reflects the socio-political culture of the time it was produced in, and I mean to reflect and experience it through the media itself. Editing, censoring and tarnishing an art piece to reflect modern sensibilities, to push propaganda or to influence the masses is shady, simple as that. Nothing warrants it. If an adult is paying and consuming any media he is licensing, I do not think the corporation should have the right to intervene. The corporation streaming it has simply the jurisdiction of a distributor in that regard, which is not the case in today's world. It sucks, but this is why Piracy and Archival projects are needed more than ever.
More info here:
This has been also evident in our own films post release as well, if you compare your old DVD copies of many older Bollywood films to the versions available now on streaming platforms, there are many scenes cut, dialogues beeped and much more. There are countless examples of this if you scour the forums and search for it, I myself have seen this in action when I compared my DVD versions of some old movies with the ones available on streaming. This is a problem for media preservationists and purists like me who enjoy watching art of its time, which is not meant to be updated like a service. Art and by extension media, in my opinion, reflects the socio-political culture of the time it was produced in, and I mean to reflect and experience it through the media itself. Editing, censoring and tarnishing an art piece to reflect modern sensibilities, to push propaganda or to influence the masses is shady, simple as that. Nothing warrants it. If an adult is paying and consuming any media he is licensing, I do not think the corporation should have the right to intervene. The corporation streaming it has simply the jurisdiction of a distributor in that regard, which is not the case in today's world. It sucks, but this is why Piracy and Archival projects are needed more than ever.
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