You have kind of a funny idea of censorship. Kickstarter can't stop the book from being made, and authors are certainly not owed assistance by Kickstarter or anyone else to get their work published. It's actually never been easier to get books published and there's certainly no actual censorship happening here. The only role Kickstarter plays is aggregating funds. The author is not limited from pursuing that goal through other means.

You're absolutely right. It was within Kickstarter's rights to defund the work, or to disallow the project, or to impose whatever burdens their whimsy could think up. Nor are they the government, from which the first amendment is intended to protect us.

The author, meanwhile, is of course free to publish the book in whatever other means he chooses.

That doesn't make it any more right in my book, and sets up a dangerous precedent that Kickstarter will now subject themselves to the whims of whichever populist group can be the most vocal.

It contradicts their brand identity to some extent. But they're a corporation like any other, so if their financial ends are served by subjecting themselves to populist whims, that's just life. One could try to compete with them on that angle. Indiegogo, for instance, seems to attract people who find Kickstarter restrictive (also Europeans).

They're a business. If a larger amount of their customer base doesn't want it, then they would presumably respond accordingly. Microsoft did it for the XBox One, after all.

I don't disagree with that either. But, for me, and I can't say whether I'm in the majority or the minority, nor do I care, but I will now literally never use Kickstarter for anything lest my project be deemed to avant garde by the populace at large.

I do sincerely hope, not for Kickstarter, but for us, that this doesn't discourage truly innovative art projects from being crowdfunded, as I think that sets art back, contrary to Kickstarter's stated goals.

In short, they've made it all too easy for me to believe that a book series like Harry Potter could be shut down by the religious right, or that Huck Finn would never have been Kickstartable, nor Nine Inch Nails' "Pretty Hate Machine", etc.

I think for your disaster scenario to be taken seriously there would need to be major cultural works--peers of Harry Potter, Huck Finn, and NIN--that were products of the Kickstarter process. Using examples that predate crowdfunding to discuss the negative repercussions of not having crowdfunding is a little ridiculous. The avenues that produced HP, HF and NIN still exist.

The point was clearly hypothetical. I wasn't looking for a statement with 'impact', so much as a way to illustrate that there are works of art that can also be considered controversial.

There are clearly books, movies and songs being funded by Kickstarter. I want the media I consume to challenge my beliefs, and to challenge my ways of thinking.

And again, I don't dispute that this was perfectly within KickStarter's right to act the way they did, and while yeah, I don't like it, who am I? Nobody. That doesn't mean that it doesn't bother me, and that doesn't mean that it isn't somewhat ominous, at least in my opinion.

You're confusing censorship with boycotting. I don't care if his book gets published...just by nobody I do business with.

I really don't think I am. The actions of the petitioners (or at least the threats thereof, whether or not they were made) could have been seen as boycotting, at some point, in the future, but the actions of Kickstarter terminating an already funded project and refunding the donated moneys is a notion far closer to censorship than to boycotting.

Kickstarter isn't censoring anybody. They don't have a military to enforce the censorship. They didn't refund the money. They made a donation to RAINN instead. The POS still gets to publish his book and the backers still get their copy.

There is no censorship in saying, you don't get to use my platform for that.

From Wikipedia: "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body."

Kickstarter exercising their control to restrict the publication of this material meets the clinical definition of censorship, even though they aren't the government. Again, I'm not saying that it wasn't within their rights to do so; it was, but being within their right doesn't make it something else.

You are right, however. I misread the statement that the project was defunded as that the moneys had been returned. The statement that they make though, at least to me, indicates that they would have defunded the project if they hadn't missed the window.

If that was their intent, I am no less saddened by it. If their actual intent was to miss the window on purpose, and then issue this apology, I am no less saddened by it.

I would argue that with MANY other publishing platforms available to the public, Kickstarter is NOT a "controlling body". Regardless, I believe wholeheartedly that censorship by the government is utterly and completely wrong, I don't believe that in this particular circumstance, it's appropriate to cry "censorship".