by Jesse Walker

About the author: Jesse Walker is an associate editor of Reason magazine.

Rose Dyson wouldn’t quite cop to being a censor. She had bragged about how her group, Canadians Concerned About Violence in Entertainment, had helped keep Howard Stern off the air in part of her country; she had endorsed the V- chip, though she felt it would be “only 10 percent of the solution”; she wanted to sue filmmakers whose movies may have prompted copycat crimes. She even admitted to supporting the old “Suicide Solution” case from the ’80s, in which a father took Ozzy Osbourne to court over the song he was convinced had driven his son to kill himself.

But the word censor has negative connotations, and...