The Simpsons� Nuclear Jokes Edited in Germany by Scott Roxborough
German Television has put a moratorium on meltdowns in The Simpsons. Reacting to the real-life nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan, Pro7, the channel that airs The Simpsons in Germany, will be screening current and future episodes of the show and remove or replace any that feature a disaster at Mr. Burns' nuclear power plant. Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper reports that networks in Austria and Switzerland have followed suit.
PHOTOS: Another controversial cartoon's most famous spoofs Austria's ORF has already pulled two episodes set to broadcast: Episode 66, Marge Gets a Job, which features scientists Marie Curie and Pierre Curie dying of radiation poisoning; and Episode 346, On a Clear Day I Can't See My Sister, in which characters joke about a nuclear meltdown. Tagesspeigel says ORF has held back eight Simpsons episodes until the end of April, when it will review its Springfield disaster policy.
So far, neither Pro7 nor Swiss network SF have pulled any Simpsons episodes but both channels say they are screening shows for "unsuitable" references to nuclear disaster.
But the danger of nuclear power is a core theme on the long-running cartoon. The Simpson's opening sequence features Homer tossing a radioactive fuel rod out of his car on the way home. The first Simpson shorts aired on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, just one year after the Chernobyl disaster.
He asked what it is with Europe as if they were the only ones who restrict speech.
Why does sexual content count as speech any less than depictions of meltdowns? And note that free speech includes the freedom to NOT say something. I didn't see any indication that this was not a corporate decision on the part of the networks.
On Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:47:55 -0700, David Johnston wrote:
edited-
I never said they were the only ones. But they seem to do it much more than the US does. The US restricts that sort of thing to stuff deemed "obscenity", whereas a variety of European countries suppress certain forms of political speech, disallow openly holding some political opinions, and censor "sensitive" but non-obscene topics from time to time.
The original post alleged that "German Television has put a moratorium on meltdowns in The Simpsons". I took that as indicating state action, since otherwise the individual broadcasters would have to all collude to withhold Simpsons fans' meltdowns.
Regardless, neither the government nor a collusion of all members of any industry should be setting themselves up as arbiters of whether speech that people might regard as being in poor taste should be permitted.
What do you mean "individual broadcasters"? There's only a single broadcaster in Germany for "The Simpsons" and the German translation of the Simpsons is already notoriously bad.
Uh, what? Just because the American model is to sell older programming into syndication doesn't mean that all countries follow that model. Some countries don't even HAVE syndication. Do you know what syndication means?
On Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:36:44 -0400, Brett A. Pasternack wrote:
But the Simpsons is an American show. The rightsholders are in America and follow the American model. What German TV production houses do with shows they own the rights to is not relevant to the Simpsons.
So what? Are they going to accept less money for their product--or maybe just not sell the rights in a certain country at all--merely because the broadcasters in a certain country follow a different model?
On Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:07:08 -0400, Brett A. Pasternack wrote:
So, the rightsholder has syndicated the show. Anyone can buy nonexclusive broadcast rights to earlier seasons from them and put them on the air. Perhaps various companies have not *chosen* to do so but they are not prevented by the rightsholder.
You are confused. The broadcasters don't follow the model. The rightsholders follow the model. Broadcasters of syndicated content pay the rightsholders for nonexclusive broadcast rights and then air the episodes. They may choose not to but one broadcaster can't force another one not to air episodes unless the first broadcaster is also the rightsholder.
You're right that the rightsholder isn't choosing a non-syndication model, but that doesn't mean that syndication actually exists.
No, YOU are confused. The rightsholder may not be particularly looking for a non-exclusive model, but that doesn't mean the rightsholder won't agree to one. And, in any event, syndication usually IS exclusive within a market. (In some cases, it's only exclusive for broadcast within a market--Seinfeld, for example, is syndicated but also on cable. But The Simpsons aren't on cable in the US.) If the first broadcaster makes a deal for exclusive rights, then it CAN prevent others from airing episodes.
Moreover, even if those rights are available, the show isn't actually IN syndication in those countries. Again, you originally said it didn't make sense that there would only be a single broadcaster of the reruns in those countries, but there's no reason there wouldn't be.
Heck, in some countries there effective IS only one broadcaster.
On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:14:05 -0400, Brett A. Pasternack wrote:
No, I am not.
What are you talking about? It's the *rightsholder* who is either selling exclusively to one network, or syndicating.
The show is either in syndication or not. It isn't in syndication in particular places. If it's in syndication, anyone can air it anywhere that's a signatory to the Berne convention by making a direct deal with the rightsholder.
Lack of local competition among broadcasters is not the same thing as the rightsholder not having syndicated the older episodes.
Perhaps, but there's no reason that the rightsholder can't syndicate in some markets while selling exclusively to one network in another.
Even within the US, Seinfeld (for example) is syndicated for broadcast, but TBS has exclusive rights to air the same episodes on non-broadcast cable. Comedy Central couldn't buy those shows as long as the TBS deal is in place.
Why not?
Am I understanding you correctly? You seem to be saying that once a show is in syndication in one country, that it is not POSSIBLE for the rightsholder to make a deal in another country granting exclusive rights to reruns of that show. Is that what you're saying? If so, what are you basing it on? If not, what are you saying?
It's the same thing as the rightsholder not having syndicated the older episodes *in that market*.
On Sun, 10 Apr 2011 15:32:43 -0700, David Johnston wrote:
What does how the buyer is run have to do with the price of tea in China? The thing is, if another German broadcaster wants to air older episodes of the Simpsons it's the rightsholder they have to negotiate with -- an American company -- and not some other German broadcaster.
Unless, of course, there's government censorship involved. Which you've claimed isn't the case here.
You've got a bad memory. I've been mentioning the translation from the start. Of course what it boils down to is this: The buyer is perfectly capable of offering a contract one of the terms of which is "You will not sell the property to any other outlet within our broadcast area.
On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:15:32 -0700, David Johnston wrote:
I most certainly do not and I'll thank you not to be so rude in the future!
There may have been one or two offhand mentions of them *as asides*; there was no mention of them in connection with the main point, regarding when and where episodes are available in any form at all.
In theory, yes. But why would they? There isn't much value in exclusivity when airing reruns of older episodes. That's why the exclusivity is normally dropped for older episodes! It no longer commands a premium worth the loss of N other potential customers.
First-run and sufficiently recent episodes usually do have exclusivity deals with regional networks, by contrast.
Um...what? When has exclusitivity ever been dropped for older episodes of shows? Every syndication deal I know of allows for only one station in a given market to broadcast those episodes. These days, it's somewhat less exclusive because there may be a separate cable deal, and because cable makes it more likely that viewers will have access to stations from more than one market, but there's still an element of exclusivity there.
We had an exception to this. We had two local stations showing Friends reruns at different times of the day. Both stations are owned by the same company.
Yes, that's true. Same thing happens occasionally with channels 5 and 9 in New York, which are both owned by Fox. You can waive exclusitivity if you own the other station.
Age of show has nothing to do with it. If it's shown on a local station broadcast to the local area at a time chosen by the station, it's syndication. If it's shown on a network, broadcast or cable, it's not.
On Mon, 11 Apr 2011 03:13:20 +0000, Wiseguy wrote:
In theory; in practise, most shows with more than five complete seasons have the older seasons in syndication (and shows that have ended are frequently syndicated, if there's a market for its reruns). So there's a strong correlation between age and syndication.
But your theoretical objection is academic, since the specific show at issue, the Simpsons, definitely has syndicated older seasons.
Ken Wesson wrote in news:4da54c3e$[email] privat.org:
privat.org:
fans'
single
and
seasons
a
No, you don't understand.
Please re-read what I wrote. (But then you clipped it so you can't). Syndication means programming (new like "Wheel of Fortune" or reruns) on a local station to a limited viewing audience at a time of the local station's choosing. The word syndication is not synonymous with rerun. Often a network (such as TVLand) will even show different versions of edited episodes than the ones shown by local stations. But even if they show the same versions, if the network has exclusive rights to the reruns it is not syndication. Only the reruns shown by local stations are considered syndication.
On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:07:51 -0700, David Johnston wrote:
Not really. Europe has a recurring pattern of getting mentioned here as having odd restrictions on speech, including even political speech, that would never be countenanced on this side of the pond.
On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 04:22:19 -0500, Ubiquitous wrote:
Unfortunately the original post doesn't really say who. It just attributes the censorship to "German Television". Is that meant to indicate a government licensing authority? A collusion of individual broadcasters? Perhaps something of a mix of both -- broadcasters acting in concert because they've been pressured unoffically by the state, the way a lot of ISPs dropped Usenet under pressure from US attorneys general a few years back?
The second sentence of the article--which you just snipped, and which everyone who quoted the OP also ignored--specifically said that the action was taken by "the channel that airs 'The Simpsons' in Germany."
The next sentence reported that networks in Austria and Switzerland were doing the same. Maybe the networks spoke with each other; maybe they didn't.
But in none of those countries was there any mention of a government agency being involved. Given that we've seen U.S. networks do the same thing when there's been a tragedy of some sort, there's no justification for jumping to a conclusion that the German government had anything to do with Pro7's decision, or the Swiss or Austrian governments with the decisions of SF or ORF.
On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:24:33 +0000, Patty Winter wrote:
When ISPs stopped carrying Usenet, none of them admitted that pressure from US attorneys general was their real reason for doing so, either; mostly they just claimed it cost too much to maintain compared to the low demand/usage among their subscriber base. (BS, of course; a usenet server costs very little to maintain, especially if no binary groups are carried, and less the less it's used; in the extreme case of no use it's just a storage spool receiving articles from outside, and you can get terabytes of storage for a couple hundred bucks these days. Pocket change to a big telco.)
Yes, but the ISPs took that as an excuse to do something they wanted to anyway. After all, a court challenge under the common carrier rules would probably have been successful. Even if they didn't want to do that, they could have just dumped the binary groups and made their usenet feed text only, like news.individual.net does. On the whole, usenet was more hassle than it was worth them, so they took the easy out.
Yes, because the ISPs started dropping Usenet before that was an excuse. I can't remember if AOL used that as an excuse, or if it came earlier. By the time AOL dropped Usenet, some other big ISPs had already dropped it.
I was at a small non-profit ISP (it was my first, starting in late 1996) and they dropped Usenet, by a note I have handy, it was January of 2002. There had already been a few years of sporadic newsgroups, once the local server died they'd bought or bartered from another local ISP, and that wasn't a great situation. When they dropped Usenet, they actually sent out an announcement saying they were moving the servers and some things would be temporarily offline. I saw that notice half an hour before things shut down, indeed if I recall I was reading newsgroups when they died. Over the next few months, there were a few announcements that the newsgroups would be back, but then in May, they actually admitted the newsgroups were gone. My take was they used the move as an opportunity to test things, when nobody much complained they saw no point in expending the effort or money, so they dropped Usenet. We were actually paying a premium compared to the other local ISPs, and as a non-profit, they should have been doing things for reasons other than the bottom line. But they also were sloppy with money (they seemed to be buying ads in one local weekly paper for the sake of supporting that paper). And they'd cleared out most of the old pesky users a few years before, when the ISP was attacked and they scapegoated the shell users (and dropped the shell without warning, though it came back eventually). It was the oldest ISP in town, and I suspect the treatment of the oldest users at that time drove many away, so a few years later when they dropped the newsgroups, there weren't many around who cared.
On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:52:29 +0000, Default User wrote:
"Probably" is sometimes not enough for a big business to wager enormous legal fees on.
Not really. The AGs would have hassled them about things in the text groups next, starting with alt.sex.
Of course, it backfired: the traffic the AGs so hated has moved to overseas news servers that are outside the jurisdiction of their subpoenas, many of which obfuscate the NNTP-Posting-Host header. So now they can't get the IPs of people who posted things they object to. (And there'd be a big jurisdictional hassle if they did -- if an American posted something that was illegal in the US, but legal where the receiving news-server was, did he commit a crime? I could see a case being made that posting something to a server in, say, Belarus is an act subject only to Belarusian law. In fact, almost all overseas internet transactions might be in effect lawless, if the server's location is considered to be the jurisdiction in which the act took place: the police there have no jurisdiction where the criminal physically resides so cannot arrest him, and the police in the criminal's area have no jurisdiction to enforce Belarusian (or whatever) law. At least, if one or both countries is outside the MLAT treaty this would seem to defacto legalize a lot of online trafficking.)
Evidence? What "hassle" was it -- other than via those AGs? Storage space is cheap, and if you don't carry binaries usenet is pretty low-bandwidth by ISP standards. YouTube browsing by their user base would have been by far a bigger bandwidth hog, not to mention p2p.
Whether or not it cost a lot (I don't know), it's something that can be measured as a cost, and once they saw few were using it, they dropped Usenet.
Usenet has also changed, since it started out as a cooperative, I'll pass your messages if you'll pass mine, to where the feed is usually some cost (not just the bandwidth, but as the sharing stopped, you'd rely increasingly not on the next hop over, but some more general feed source of Usenet). That too was a factor, since the hardware and bandwidth might be folded into existing costs/equipment, but there was that feed to account for.
In the old days, there was no profit to be made from internet access, so it didn't really matter. Even when ISPs started up in the late eighties or early nineties to provide access to those without university or business, it was questionable what might happen. The first ISP here set up as a non-profit, I'm assuming since they just couldn't see making a profit. It was about getting access.
Usenet wasn't just a service provided, it was a means of interacting right at that ISP. Once Usenet was set up at an ISP, there could be a local forum or local forums, which at the time was fairly important. When for pay ISPs started up, it was the cusp of a change to local as community. Up to a certain point, internet density was so low in all but a handful of places (and even then it was still a subset of the population) that local really meant nothing. If an ISP didn't have a local forum, then likely people didn't interact. It's the rise of the for pay ISP that allowed "local" to be significantly, though ironically by the time it became significant, things were splintered and the branded spaces had become the norm.
Then things turned, and companies came in to make profit. That set up a whole different situation. It also coincided with a change, from when you'd run a terminal program on your computer and ran a newsreader and a mailreader on your ISP's computer to PPP connections where you'd run the software on your computer, and your ISP was only a net connection. I was really surprised, five years ago, when I changed ISPs and they asked me if I wanted/needed an email address. That used to be standard, nowadays too many people don't even want to show off their ISP (indeed, they see them as completely interchangeable, just go for the cheapest one), don't want to bother with a mailreader, so they use gmail and such.
It's a whole different game. People see the internet as utility, not community. And they see it as commerce. They can't see what might be wrong with using branded spaces for things we used to do without ownership. They follow trends, just like society in general, so they jump from blogging to myspace to facebook to twitter, not sticking with something because the crowd has moved on.
The ISPs don't want to provide services when they are out there "free". They have changed into merely being access to the internet, rather than something more significant.
On Tue, 05 Apr 2011 06:45:03 -0700, David Johnston wrote:
That goes with the territory of running an ISP. Getting rid of usenet service would not get rid of the need to field abuse complaints. If they got rid of email, too, and the ability to connect to remote machines, maybe then. :)
On Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:02:09 -0700, David Johnston wrote:
You can't have it both ways. Either hardly anybody used usenet, in which case it would reduce the need to nearly zero (very few customers using usenet, even fewer provoking abuse complaints), or enough people used usenet to justify keeping the servers running.
I wonder if The Simpsons creators will edit together a new opening credt sequence for The Simpsons airing there or if Germany will let that Nuclear Disaster moment slip through as 'harmless'?
It might just be temporary. Didn't most places pull from syndication the episode with the World Trade Center towers in the months following 9/11? It was eventually shown again.
And didn't Fox make some adjustments to an early episode of "24", which involved an airline hijacking and was to air shortly after 9/11?
This type of thing happens all the time after disasters. And r.a.tv posters are generally split between those who say "The producers are wimps" and those who say "It's nice that the broadcasters are sensitive to viewers' feelings about recent tragedies."
I just got into reading this ... but my first thought is that PArker and Stone will have something about this when South Park resumes shortly ... and definitely not politically correct ...