For some reason the only way I can find to get the full text of The LA Times Article requires registration @philly.com [[email protected], lisnews1].
They say In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.
The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.
You may have first heard of this when Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner, filed suit.
Officials from the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees OFAC, declined comment, but spokeswoman Molly Millerwise described the sanctions as “a very important part of our overall national security.”
Also found in another spot
A related article about this same subject and a lawsuit filed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was found in the most recent edition of Information Today. OFAC cites conflicting laws which can hold a US citizen in prison for 5-10 years and a $10,000 fine for each infraction – that is, editing or proofing research material from authors in countries that have US sanctions against them. The conflict is that the same restrictions do not hold true for newspapers and journalists.
The name of the article is “Publishers Sue Treasury Department” in the December 2004 issue. Unfortunately, the article is not linked from http://www.infotoday.com/it/dec04/index.shtml
Re:Also found in another spot …of course you’ve all read “1984”…..
Looks like I’ll have to rebind in a fake cover my copy of THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by Emmanuel Goldstein