Category: Legal

57 years ago today the first news of how the recently formed Comics Code Authority censored comics hit the wires, and Tim Stroup’s excellent “Today In Comics” blog has the clippings. Stroup gathers stories from five news services that covered Comics Code administrator Charles Murphy’s press conference touting the organization’s work to diminish the impact of images containing sexuality and violence within comic books.

Earlier this year the Comics Code Authority closed its doors and the CBLDF acquired the intellectual property rights to the Code’s Seal of Approval. Thus ended an era of censorship that sanitized the medium’s output, and established a stigma against comics that would endure until recent years. Dr. Amy Nyberg created a short history of the Seal of Approval for the CBLDF.

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Earlier this year, free speech advocates, including CBLDF, won a victory with Brown v. EMA (formerly Schwarzennegger v. EMA), a Supreme Court decision that struck down a California law that violated the First Amendment and would have included violence among unprotected expression, alongside obscenity. Had the California law stood, it would have impinged upon the First Amendment rights of minors and their parents. It would have had additional repercussions, likely leading to the censorship of violence in other entertainment media, including comic books.

In a recent article for Media Law Monitor — Moral Panics, the First Amendment, and the Limits of Social Science — CBLDF General Counsel Robert Corn-Revere analyzed the Brown v. EMA decision, discussing the lack of scientific evidence that proponents for the regulation of violent speech claimed to have.

Keep reading for excerpts from the article…

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In 1997 — in spite of aid from CBLDF — Mike Diana became the first American artist to be convicted of obscenity in the United States. Diana is the controversial creator of the zine Boiled Angel, and his work contains graphic and often shocking depictions of society’s most serious problems: child abuse, date rape, and religious corruption.

Richardson Magazine recently interviewed Diana about his prosecution, conviction, and subsequent punishment. Diana describes his experience and how CBLDF got involved:

The first time I showed up to court to enter my plea I was mobbed with TV and radio reporters as well as two groups of concerned Christian citizens with protest signs. I plead not guilty and then contacted the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for help. They got me a lawyer, Luke Lerot, and after much red tape and attempting and failing to get the case thrown out or moved to Tampa, where we felt we would get a better chance at a fair jury, it was time a year later to go to trial.

I was railroaded in court, the prosecution told the jury I was a suspect in the Gainsville murders even though the real killer was caught and had plead guilty just days before my trial started. They claimed that the art in Boiled Angel was made for killers and would turn people who read it into killers…

You can read the full interview here. (Note: The article contains NSFW images.)

Support CBLDF’s defense of free speech by making a donation or becoming a member today!

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The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Board of Directors has unanimously elected noted litigator Dale Cendali to the office of Secretary. Cendali, who joined the board in 2010, replaces retiring Board Member Louise Nemschoff in the role.

Dale Cendali is a nationally recognized leader in the field of intellectual property. She is a partner in the prestigious law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where she heads the firm’s Copyright, Trademark and Internet Practice Group. She has successfully litigated and tried numerous high profile cases and has argued before the United States Supreme Court. Her clients include myriad prominent individuals and companies who rely on her for her expertise in copyright, trademark, patent, Internet, trade secrets, defamation, false advertising, privacy and contractual matters. She has extensive experience representing clients in the entertainment, consumer products and technology sectors. Managing Intellectual Property Magazine named her trial victory for J.K. Rowling in the well-known “lexicon” fair use case the “Copyright Trial of the Year.”

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Writing exclusively for the CBLDF, Yuricon founder Erica Friedman discusses the CBLDF’s important efforts against Canada Customs.

There is a gap here, in between actions and words, in between discussion of freedom of expression and actual freedom of expression. It is not a small gap – it is a tiger pit. It is a gap that is, right this very second, affecting all of us in the manga community. The gap lies in between our stated right to express ourselves freely and recents actions of authority to strip that right from us.

This issue not a rhetorical one to me. I am about to leave the country to attend a comic event called Girls Love Fest. It is focused entirely on comics with lesbian themes. This is the genre that I have worked on promoting for more than a decade – and for the first time in my life, I am not sure that I can purchase these comics and bring them home with me. Because I cannot be sure that a reasonable person would understand that the comic of two cute girls holding hands, saying they like each other and kissing is not offensive. I cannot presume that the people hired to “protect” us are reasonable at all. Why should they be? These people have been given imprimatur to be unreasonable and suspicious. I want to support these artists, and share their work…but I may not be able to. I certainly have to look at each book more critically and think “what would TSA make of this?”

Full Story

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