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. Robert Bovenschulte, president of the American Chemical Society's publications division is quoted as saying:

"By not publishing articles coming from the five countries under trade embargo, we were, in effect, in violation of our own ethical guidelines that say that the basis for deciding what to publish is the quality of the science in the material and excludes the national origin of that material," Bovenschulte said. If the government decides to prosecute, he said, "I think we are going to be in good company."

As I've noted above the impacts of this ruling are imense just not for print publishers but for ejournals and blogs:

Under the regulations, said Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Assn. of American Publishers, "if a publisher is trying to make a deal with an Iranian author about publication of a manuscript that is not completed, anything the publisher would do that would alter that manuscript would be prohibited and would require a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control." The result, said Adler, is a "chilling effect" on publishers.

So if someone from an embargoed country submits a ms in Word and I as an editor convert it to HTML or PHP or anything else I'd be in viloation. As anyone who has submitted an article to a jornal of any kind knows, editors of journals often require some changes or makes suggestions for changes they want prior to publishing the piece. So much for the US being the intellectual captial of the world if these sorts of policies continue.