U.S. Embargos Extended to Editing Articles

The L.A.
Times (‘free’ registration required–thus my extensive quoting) has story
about how:

the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control
recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations
under trade embargoes. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a
“service” and it is illegal to perform services for embargoed nations, the
agency has ruled.

This raises all sorts of questions like does
tagging and indexing a blog post count as editing, does reformating an article
to fit a house or blog style count as editing? And is a ‘service’ really a
‘service’ if no money changes hands? It seems some publishers, including the
American Chemical Society, have decided to risk “fines of up to a half-million
dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years” by editing scholarly articles they
publish.
—U.S. Embargos Extended to Editing ArticlesKairosNews/LA Times)

Since the LA Times requires an obnoxious registration, I’m linking to Scott’s post on KairosNews instead.