Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Humor in the World of Codes of Ethics

Speaking of Flak magazine, they have a great code of ethics on their site, which starts with:
1. A writer cannot have a direct fiscal or creative interest in anything he or she writes about. A direct interest includes contributing content, getting paid by the publishers/creators of the thing reviewed, or being directly related to the publishers/creators.

For this purpose, "directly related" includes "boinking."
and ends with:
Writers or editors who violate this ethics code may be subject to penalties up to and including a condescending lecture.
Ethicsweb points to Halliburton Co.'s code of ethics, but when I followed the link I was informed that "the page or file that you're looking for is not available." Ho ho. (Actually, their code of conduct is here.)

For what it's worth, neither the RIAA nor the IFPI have a code of ethics, code of conduct, or anything similar on their sites. Big surprise. Nevertheless, that didn't stop them from trying to get ISP's to adopt one that they made for them. And here's another one (PDF) they made for universities.

Yehuda

1 comment:

Sean said...

Well, now that you've brought it up, I suppose I need to say that, as interim co-editor of Flak's game section, that I have a game coming out this fall from Rio Grande Games, who published/distributed two of the titles reviewed in the piece (Puerto Rico and Lost Cities) and have a game under consideration at Mayfair (who publishes/distributes Settlers of Catan). My defense is that, a, Settlers and Puerto Rico are canonical, b, I didn't change anything in the Lost Cities review, and c, the other interim co-editor, James Norton, has no vested interest and will be in on all related correspondence. Also, d, Rio Grande and Mayfair weren't the original publishers of those games, so praise those games isn't really the same as flattery toward those publishers.