I’ve been thinking lately about the fact that laws and contracts haven’t caught up with advances in mobile technology (for example, I just finished a post about movie script writers not receiving royalties for ringtones based on movie quotes)…but that’s something to be sorted out by the industry. When should the courts get involved?
Last month Egypt’s grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, deemed the use of Quranic verses as ringing tones on mobile phones as ‘haram’ (prohibited by Islam) because it trivialized the Koran. This got me thinking about what kinds of ringtones could be deemed illegal in various countries…many countries have laws against “hate speech” which could be assumed to include ringtones, but it really depends on how the laws are written. Moantones (ringtones based on the simulated orgasms of porn stars) could be seen as a bit of light-hearted fun or they could be seen as public pornography which breaks local decency laws, depending on a number of factors.
This issue is already coming to the fore with mobile phones…A couple of weeks ago a judge ruled a Virginia man didn’t break the states privacy law when he used a cameraphone to take a picture up a woman’s skirt at a shopping mall: “Although invasion of privacy sounds like what this defendant did, he did not violate” the law, Bayley wrote in a seven-page opinion. Therefore, Bayley said, he had to acquit Robert G. Sullivan. The New Zealand parliament is debating the Crimes (Intimate Covert Filming) Amendment Bill to take into account new technology such as mobiles with cameraphones, which weren’t covered at the time of the post back in June.
These laws will probably be for the benefit of the mobile content industry — even an adult content provider claimed that strong age restrictions were a boost for the industry because it gave consumers confidence the content adhered to all the appropriate policies and local laws. But if the laws are written badly (and lets face it, that isn’t a rare occurence) it could create some issues for the mobile content industry, through restrictions in hardware as well as content.
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