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Is the Sony decision a blow to artistic freedom?

Ann Oldenburg
USA TODAY
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High-powered Hollywood filmmakers, screenwriters and stars are slamming Sony for "caving" to terrorists by pulling The Interview from all platforms. They say the studio's move is a blow to artistic freedom and to First Amendment rights.

Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin called it a "stunning display of corporate cowardice" in a blog post.

George Clooney and his agent Bryan Lourd sent around a petition to studio heads in support of Sony, but no one would sign it. "This was a dumb comedy,"Clooney told Deadline. "But the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this."

"Sad day for creative expression," tweeted Steve Carell. A movie he was supposed to start filming in March, Pyongyang, set in North Korea, was scrapped in the wake of the Sony situation.

"It's already having a chilling effect," notes Gavin Edwards, author of Last Night at the Viper Room, about River Phoenix. He says the Carell film was to be based on a book by Guy Delisle, "a sad lyrical comic book about a Frenchman working in North Korea on a not very good animated film. It's sort of half travelogue and half portrait of being lonely, isolated in a place where you don't know the language."

It's hardly a plot of killing a country's leader, a la The Interview.

Alchemist author Paulo Coelho is taking the situation so seriously that he has offered Sony $100,000 for the rights to the film. He wants to post it on his blog for everyone to watch for free. Sony has yet to respond.

"Being a writer and an artist, I witnessed what happened with Salman Rushdie many years ago," he tells USA TODAY in an e-mail. Rushdie's novel Satanic Verses prompted Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to pronounce a death sentence on Rushdie for insulting Islam.

"People were not being driven by this culture of fear that we see now. So publishers faced the threat, and some people died (I know a Scandinavian publisher who was murdered). However, freedom of speech survived."

As a writer, he says, "freedom of information/distribution is important for me. When I posted that tweet, I was conscious that now I am also in the line of fire. But either you stand for your values, or you don't deserve the freedom you have."

Sony, he says, "created a dangerous precedent. The same thing may happen in the future."

He also questions Sony's motives. "I don't think they were moved by protecting the people and theaters. Their main reason is, in my opinion, leaks that we started to see in the press — and scared them."

What should Sony have done? "Stand for the American values: fight for your right to speak freely, and don't negotiate with terrorists."

Rachel Ehrenfeld, founder and CEO of New York-based American Center for Democracy, finds Sony's reaction to the threat "appalling." She also uses the words "unacceptable" and "outrageous."

Ehrenfeld says, "We lost our first cyber war and we lost much more. We lost our freedom, our ability to speak freely — which makes the Unites States unique and different from every country. This is shameful."

She says that the 9/11-type attack threat from the Guardians of Peace group should not have won out over "America's right for free expression. It's the most important value upon which America is based. Every writer and artist is in danger now — to say what we want, to make any joke we want, make any comedy we want."

Yet Chicago attorney Andrew Stoltmann says Sony faced a big liability.

"Obviously you don't want to chill artistic freedom, which would be a huge problem. But in the same sense, there is no question, Sony would have faced mega liability and a tsunami of lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny if something had happened at a theater. Yes, the artistic issue is important, but the dollars and cents decision if I'm a CEO or in the legal department of Sony is a pretty easy decision to make."

Steve Weisman, a professor at Boston's Bentley University and an expert in cybercrime, is a little more tempered. "There's a legitimate concern about the threat of 9/11-type violence, but I think that could have been dealt with (through) with enhanced security at theaters."

He says, "North Korea is not a particular major world power, but look at the power they have here. To have us be so vulnerable to this kind of extortion when someone doesn't like the topic of your art and your work is a frightening process for the First Amendment and art and free expression of ideas."

Sony, he says, "could have anticipated this kind of thing." He says it should be a "wake-up call" for all studios to beef up their cybersecurity. "Everything you're going to see in art and a global village is going to upset someone these days."

President Obama's advice to us all came in an ABC interview Wednesday night: "For now, my recommendation would be that people go to the movies."

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