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China Clamps Down On Another Serious Threat To The Middle Kingdom: Western Animal Cartoon Books For Children

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Here's the latest instalment in the long-running Techdirt series "just when you thought there was nothing left to control, China comes up with something else it wants to throttle", as reported by the South China Morning Post:

An order from Beijing will drastically cut the number of foreign picture books for children published in mainland China this year, four publishing sources told the South China Morning Post.The order opens a new front in a broad campaign to reduce the influence of foreign ideas and enhance ideological control, applying restrictions to animal cartoons and fairy tales written for toddlers and older children that have few political implications. Chinese universities were previously ordered to limit the use of Western textbooks and promote communist dogma.
According to the article, China's state publishing administration has imposed a quota system on domestic publishers, limiting the number of foreign picture books that can be published in any one year. Apparently, the aim is two-fold: to promote children's books created by domestic authors and illustrators; and to stop innocent young Chinese minds being seduced by the subtle charms of Western propaganda in the form of cartoon stories about animals.But it's not just children that the Chinese authorities want to shield from harmful ideas. Quartz has a related story about a more general clampdown on Western publications that has been imposed on vendors using the leading online shopping site Taobao, part of the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba:
Taobao has ordered all vendors to stop selling foreign media starting today -- even if authorities have approved the media for circulation in China. The online shopping platform, owned by Alibaba, has been one of the few places to browse overseas publications free from censors, largely because the site's business model allows individual vendors to do business directly with customers. It's also helped that the daigou, or overseas agents, can evade import duties by carrying or shipping goods into China.
As the Quartz article notes, the new rule cites an obscure 1991 law; its unexpected invocation now seems related to a general clampdown around the highly-sensitive two-week National People's Congress, currently under way in Beijing. Perhaps Western cartoon animals have fallen victim to the same paranoia.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Lawyer's Association Asks New California Attorney General To Drop Its Abusive Prosecution Of Backpage

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The First Amendment Lawyer's Association (FALA) is hoping to end the California Attorney General's crusade against Backpage. The website has already ceded ground in the face of constant criticism, investigations, and legal threats. Earlier this year, it shuttered its adult ads rather than continue to bleed money and time defending itself against bogus prosecutions and investigations.Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris -- who blew off court decisions against her office to continue to prosecute Backpage -- has now moved on to the US Senate. But just because Harris has moved on doesn't mean the local AG's office isn't going to continue with Harris' unfinished business.The letter from FALA is covered (but not published[?]) by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason.

On March 14, FALA—a nonprofit membership association launched in the late '60s that has boasted some of the country's top constitutional lawyers—sent a letter to Becerra condemning "the abusive prosecution of individuals associated with the online classified advertising website Backpage.com, and also the use of expansive search warrants seeking vast amounts of constitutionally-protected material, including personally identifiable information about all of the website's users." In the letter, FALA President Marc Randazza says he can identify "no theory under the First Amendment that would countenance such an abusive use of prosecutorial discretion or such a dragnet demand for information."
The letter points out the flaws of the AG's case against Backpage. Not only does it do damage to protected speech, but it ignores Section 230 protections in the ongoing quest to punish the site's owners for the actions of its users.On top of that, there's the overbreadth of prosecutors' demands for info from the site. Not content to steamroll the First Amendment, the office also made a mockery of the term "investigation." From the letter:
We have learned that a subpoena was served on Backpage.com that calls for the production of massive amounts of information for a several-year period, including copies of all advertisements posted (in all content categories), all billing records, the identities of all of the website's users and their account histories, all internal communications, and even the source code for the operation of the website.
As FALA points out, this sounds a whole lot like the colonial-era "general warrants" -- the same ones our government sought to eliminate with the Fourth Amendment.On the plus side, the new California Attorney General has pledged to protect civil liberties. FALA's hoping that pledge extends to Kamala Harris' unfinished business.

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