I wonder
Since it would be illegal to possess a copy of extreme porn, and I guess to watch it, could the BBFC be prosecuted merely for viewing any illegaly films which are submitted to them?
UK.gov says extreme porn isn't illegal if you delete it...
The Ministry of Justice promised to provide public guidelines to the new extreme porn legislation this week and – behold! – here they are. They have been greeted with some degree of criticism from those opposed to the legislation, on the grounds that they add little new to what was already known and fail to make matters as …
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Friday 28th November 2008 17:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
"involves sex with a corpse or animal"..
So that's pretty-much all halfway hardcore porn banned then.
Or are human beings being defined as vegetable or mineral for the purposes of this legislation?
Although I suppose that in all fairness the vegetable classification may be accurate enough to apply to some of those pushing this vague and laughable legislation through..
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Friday 28th November 2008 17:00 GMT Jamie Kitson
Man Bites Dog
Excellent film. If I remember correctly it contains several scenes ripe for the prosecution, including a rape scene, I think.
What ever happened to that film (I forget the title) which caused such a furore because a rape victim appeared to enjoy the act?
There's the original(?) Crash film too, I haven't seen either, but I am told that the 1996 film includes scenes of a sexual nature with, erm, an injury, the quote is something like "no, not there, here."
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Friday 28th November 2008 17:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
You've got to love the government.
In the same week they force deviants onto the streets and out of easy networked view, by banning them from satisfying their weird lusts, they also announce that the self same men will be liable for prosecution if the woman who is taking his money for sex is trafficked without his knowledge.
What an absolutely brilliant way of breeding serial killers.
I wonder, will the government be issuing free hammers to these men?
I wish had no female relatives to be put at risk by the nutters they're creating and forcing out onto the streets.
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Friday 28th November 2008 20:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
thats me for the nick then
I wear a PA ring thru my bits - did it about 20 years ago..
Have a few images I made via a digy camera now somewhere on my hard drive. I wanted to see what it looked like from a 3rd party view point... (never distributed to anyone - too shy)
so the bit where it says
"serious injury" is not defined, but "could include the insertion of sharp objects or the mutilation of breasts or genitals".
Well thats me up infront of the judge... Do i get on some register somehere - I'm a danger to society....
posting as anon sorry
ps - Im going to delete them - opps -i have the ability to recover them so that no good as well..
Paris because she would not be offended my by images
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Friday 28th November 2008 20:21 GMT Graham Marsden
What guidance...?
So we have the "guidlines" at last, except that they provide very little "guidance" and mostly just re-iterate the same old twaddle that we've heard before, not to mention that, in places, they actually contradict the law as written eg it says an image must be "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an offensive nature", yet the guidance says it must fit all the criteria, ie it should be AND of an offensive nature.
We also don't know what is "life threatening". Skydiving or riding a motorcycle can be "life threatening" if done without adequate safety precautions, so if someone takes adequate safety precautions when involved in breath-play, would that be ok? I doubt it.
Ditto for "serious injury". I actually asked the MoJ if that would be defined as GBH, since that's the definition the courts used, but they've decided that, no, it isn't, presumably because that would be too stringent a test for them to catch the stuff they don't like.
"Explicit and realistic" are, frankly, tautologous. If it's porn, it's probably explicit. If it's real people (even if acting) it's "realistic", so no help there.
"Obscene" is also said to take its definition from the dictionary instead of the mass of case law from the Obscene Publications Act, yet Chambers has "Obscene: UK Law - Liable to corrupt and deprave", so is that included or not?
Also they keep claiming that this act will only catch stuff which is "illegal to publish under the OPA", yet as the article points out, it will catch excerpts from films which are *not* obscene when shown as a whole, yet *will* be obscene if taken out of context!
And, finally, we have the statement that if you've deleted the images you're ok, unless you're a techie and have undelete software, in which case you'll need to use a file shredder to be safe.
The MoJ also basically say that it's going to be up to the Magistrates or Judges to decide if an image fits the definitions given, in other words they've made a huge mess and then want the courts to clean it up and we're left with the definitions of "pornographic" returning to the 1970s where "porn is whatever gets the Judge turned on"!
PS @ I Wonder:
The BBFC would not be prosecuted because paragraph 65 says:
65 Defences: general
(1) Where a person is charged with an offence under section 63, it is a defence for the person to prove any of the matters mentioned in subsection (2).
(2) The matters are—
(a) that the person had a legitimate reason for being in possession of the image concerned;
The BBFC can claim to have a legitimate reason for possession, just as the police officers who have to evaluate seized material are allowed to possess it.
PPS @ Richard Cartledge
If you think it's gross, don't look at it. But don't be as arrogant as this Government and think that *your* personal tastes should define what everyone else is allowed to look at.
PPPS @ John Ozimek: "Exteme" porn...?! ;-)
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Friday 28th November 2008 20:21 GMT blue
Incompetence
They have pretty much one major task to perform, MPs - they do it all the time, even when it's not necessary, just to prove that they're in control and to placate the 'outraged' and 'offended': they write laws.
And they cannot do it. They botch the terms, throw open the consequences with abandon, broaden the remit to include possibly anyone and fail, unremittingly, to place proper restraints and boundaries on the powers they enact.
They cannot write laws to save their worthless skins. They are unqualified for their jobs and their wanton incompetence impacts upon the lives of us all, wrecking those of any number.
Where we may be prosecuted for fictional but realistic IMAGES of non-real POSSIBLE harm, there is rarely any negative consequence for the very real harm politicians do to us with their insane scribblings.
An itchy pox on the vast majority of them.
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Friday 28th November 2008 20:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
oh ffs
I am honestly sick and tired of Crash Gordon and Wacky Jacqui, they are now purely reacting to whoever shouts loudest (and on most occasions the vocal minority) and not considering what they are doing...the economy has been brought to its needs, politicians who's job it is to release information are being arrested, information silos are being built to snoop on everyone, and now this pile of crap.
Labour OUT! Please *do* let the door hit you on the way out.
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Friday 28th November 2008 20:21 GMT Chris
Re: satisfying their weird lusts
On the contrary, and I ain't no psychologist, but I would suggest that by being able to freely watch this weird stuff, it is only further desensitising them from it and making them think it's "normal".
However.... why ban "life-threatening" scenes only related to sex? Double standards.
Doesn't affect me anyhow, I like to see people enjoying themselves!!
Paris... well do I even need to explain why?!
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Friday 28th November 2008 20:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
La Vice Anglais
It's always said, of course, that the British ruling classes function on a diet of spanking, both handing it out and taking. One might mention Max Mosley in this context. Which makes the choice of ``serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals'', and the exclusion of buttocks, quite interesting.
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Friday 28th November 2008 20:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Jacqui Smith is a Time Lord
Because to me there is a clear causal link here, the mother of a rape victim decides the fix to rape is to ban violent porn, demands an extreme porn ban, August 2006. The government says it plans to make possession of extreme porn a 3 year prison sentence.
IN 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/5297600.stm
September 2007 Jacqui Smith, MP for Reddich commission a 'study' to survey the research and decide on the law they had already agreed a year eariler and concludes from this 'research' that there is a causal link:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/280907a.pdf
I am forced therefore to conclude that Jacqui Smith NuLabour MP for Reddich, defender of freedom of the press and protector of freedom to vote for whoever you link including the BNP or Tories, is a Time Lord, and not a fooking liar who makes up evidence to fit whatever causal link she wants to claim.
Because there's no way Gordon Brown would employ a fooking liar would he? No she must be a Time Lord then!
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Saturday 29th November 2008 08:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 28th November 2008 18:03 GMT
Ain't nothing but mammals
last I looked humans were animals.
----------------------
Humans are not animals. We are Gods creatures and made in his image.
With the exception of Pediophiles and Pornographers of cause.
Oh and rock and roll singers, they're the spawn of Satan.
Oh and I forgot to mention blasphemers, philanderers, geeks, people who enjoy sex, people who use the Internet, any one who disagrees with me, that woman across the
street who put up net curtains last week in her front room; I know what you where doing I've got the photographs to prove it.
Oh bugger now I have to hand my self in for having pictures of extreme porn.
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Saturday 29th November 2008 08:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Presumably gay bareback porn is illegal, then?
Being pornographic, grossly offensive (to some) and portraying activity that threatens harm to life (through HIV)
In fact, any non-condom porn, gay or straight, is probably illegal due to it depicting an activity that is potentially causing risk to life, and there's always going to be someone (religious extremists?) who find it grossly offensive.
In fact, given that condoms aren't 100% effective and could split at any time, sure all intercourse is now prohibited in porn?
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Saturday 29th November 2008 09:13 GMT Richard
John Zorn's Torture Garden?
I wonder if this twaddle affects covers of published records, such as John Zorn's Torture Garden (mild cover shot here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Garden_(album) -- the interior record artwork I'll leave the less sensitive reader to google). As far as I know you can buy this record at such purveyors of extreme porn as amazon.co.uk.
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Saturday 29th November 2008 09:13 GMT Richard
Re: "legitimate reason"
To Graham above who says that you're OK if ...
(a) that the person had a legitimate reason for being in possession of the image concerned;
Presumably a "legitimate reason" is I downloaded it off the internet. An "illegitimate reason" would be that aliens from the planet Zog beamed it onto my hard-drive?
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Saturday 29th November 2008 23:25 GMT Rachel
a screenshot is required
"Two interesting features of this new law arise in respect of potential defences. The first is where the material in question is a BBFC classified film, that should be an absolute defence. However, if you extract images or sequences from that film, your defence may fall."
Damn, there goes our collection of screenshots from movies - most 'extreme' porn is so dreadfuly dull (like the Satanic Sluts image from a previous report) or looks like the person is not actually enjoying themselves (like the slightly weird performance artists who stick skewers through their own tits and stuff). At least movie depictions of gore have acting and budget.
I gotta be honest with you, there's some pretty revolting stuff out there, even if it is consensual, but I'm not worried about people viewing it and getting hard, I'm worried about them. I know a lot of fetish performers and it seems like a majority of them have some form of dysmorphia. No real effort seems to have been put into the discussion of this as a psychological problem.
Saying that, I also choose to be pierced and tattooed and 'live an alternative lifestyle' (as it were), so any help which would be offered to those who I perceive as being a bit fucked up better be voluntary, non-aggressive, compassionate and generally right on the money, since they might get round to applying it to me, too. Judging by the standards of current medical and psychological practice, we maybe better skip that idea just now.
This idea of banning books and publications is so seventeenth century. I'm sick of this new Puritanism making me feel uneasy about my personal security. Someone on here yesterday commented that David Walliams said 'shag' on the radio and there was an apology - is sex that filthy, dirty and disgusting that you can never mention it at all? Anyone who talks in any non scientific way about 'sexual intercourse' is a weirdo. 'Darling, would you like to have intercourse?' It's just such utter bullshit, like the Daily Mail calling a reefer a 'marijuana 'spliff' '. The concurrent acceptance of massive levels of violence in mainstream culture merely underlines this hypocrisy.
As a collector of erotica, I have at least one item which is illegal in my house. As a matter of fact, I find it distasteful, but since it was acquired on a trip to Japan, where the particular 'kink' is particularly accepted, and it is in a manga that I got from a vending machine for 250 yen, I consider it simply a souvenir of my trip and it is placed with my other books on erotic art and sexuality.
Anyone interested in this sort of thing should very much look at the work of Gershon Legman, a librarian with an interest in erotica and its suppression who introduced origami to the West.
Also, it is very interesting to note that the Victorian values which strove to remove the overtly sexual from art meant that the buxom naked women who adorned the walls were replaced with whimsical images of naked children, often in sexual poses. Who knows, if the social and moral values of the time had not precluded Mr Charles Dodgson from taking pictures of healthy young matrons, would Alice in Wonderland have been written by a noted paedophile?
Censorship and prohibition are not good things, and they demonstrably don't work. But as Aldous Huxley said, the most important lesson we can learn from history is the inability of humans to learn lessons from history.
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Saturday 29th November 2008 23:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Get-out clause
The guidelines require images to "have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.". Most people are not "sexually aroused" by violent porn, so presumable a "showcase" of such obnoxious porn automatically exempts them.
Conversely, many fetishes are not sexually explicit (eg. rubberwear). So your average Arnold Schwarzenegger movie may well be a huge sexual turn-on for some people, and hence, pornographic. But is it **realistic** to see Schwarzenegger's character murder so many people?
This seems to be a case that SOME people might find such images sexually arousing, AND, SOME people may consider the images to be realistic. But don't we all know that most porn is not realistic anyway?
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Saturday 29th November 2008 23:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Competition
Let's run a competition to see who can produce the most extreme porn that fails the guidelines. For example, it must not sexually arouse (eg. character look like female Labour politician, or wears baggy M&S knickers), and must not be realistically harmful (eg. picture shows a rubber knife, or gallons of ketchup, next to extreme porn image showing their use). And are you having sex with that cat on your lap?
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Saturday 29th November 2008 23:25 GMT Thomas Glover
Heart's in the right place, but surely there's question's of funding and enforcing
While I find the kind of stuff the Government is trying to ban here utterly repugnant myself, and can see how the 'extreme porn' may have repercussions, how the hell are they going to police it and how much money has gone into this?
At a time of financial crisis, how much are they wasting on this scheme of making sure people on the internet "delete extreme porn, but not if they're techies, in which case they'll have to burn their computer". Why can't they just focus legislation on people who run the websites for extrem porn?
Also, how the flying HELL are they going to determine the level of expertise necessary to say whether someone can recover deleted files? I don't know how to, but I know with a Google search I could find software or instructions on how to. So what would I do if I was found to have it? Surely anyone with a net connection and knowledge of search engines ultimately is capable of recovering deleted files?
Any harm this genre causes would be prevented and any images people already own would come from a production from which any harm has already been done.
To police the computers of everyone who might have this would amount to a ludicrous amount of funds.
Skull and crossbones because that's not a cartoon - it's from my next violent porn production:
"Skulls and cross boners"
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Monday 1st December 2008 10:36 GMT Watashi
Let them read Playboy
The key point here is that there has been absolutely no sign of a public debate. The proles are clearly too stupid to understand and the bourgeois obviously should know better. That there may be a genuine psycological discussion to be had over the effects of watching 'extreme porn' is neither here nor there. Also, it seems the question of whether or not there could be a wider libertarian justification for tolerating some of the images being labelled extreme porn, (or tolerating strong cannabis, militant religion, prostitution or Treasury leaks for that matter) is a question that we're not supposed to ask.
The rank hypocracy is another problem here (but this is not a suprise from Brown). In the context of a society where glamour model is listed as many girls' top choice for ideal job, one wonders if Brown is going after the right target. Surely women would benifit more from stopping supermarkets displaying pictures of semi-naked women with giant fake breasts and photoshopped waists and thighs on the front covers of Nuts and Zoo? Some proper sex education in schools and the government actively talking about the now ubiquitous objectification of women throughout the whole of society (which is worse now than it was before feminism was invented) may help even more. Or is this more about controlling the behaviour of those who enjoy anything that runs against Brown's private Christian moral sensibilities?
Apparently the term 'New Labour' is no longer applicable; I've read that it's 'Zanu Labour' now.
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Monday 1st December 2008 10:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
fixing wacqui jacqui
don't bother getting some photoshopped pics of the dumb old bint into some Xtreme-pr0n action... As _THAT_ isn't covered under the legislation. Staring is not a crime...
Instead on that day she's due to hold up some document or other in front of a bunch of television camera's wouldn't it be lovely if...
. . . "Oh My God! HOW on earth did that get in there!"
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Monday 1st December 2008 10:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hysterical Leader for Hysterical Times
The problem as I see it, something bad happens, the newspapers whip up hysterical storm, Jacqui Smith makes a quick knee jerk law to jump on the hysteria bandwagon.
Then the hysteria dies down and everyone feels a foolish and hopes their leaders make a more balanced choice, something that makes sense when there is no hysteria.
But Jacqui can't then back down, she put her head on the line to produce an extreme law, she need to whip up the hysteria again, because only when the people are hysterical can she get this nutty stuff passed.
So we get her and the ACPO members that support her, whipping up a frenzy as laws go through parliament, and trying to suppress the debate with hysterical screaming.
Look at the 42 day detention thing, Parliament said no, Jacqui Smith then declares that she'll keep an emergency bill ready for the next bought of hysteria. Which no doubt she will be whipping up at the first opportunity.
Law making by hysteria.
IMHO, she's simply not fit to hold a senior position, she's made a law to transfer the blame from rapists to viewers of porn, from traffickers to johns, from terrorist to people who express opinions. She treats people like potential terrorists.
It makes sense to hysterical people to punish someone ANYONE when something bad happens, but in the cold light of day, she is simply prosecuting random people for things they are not responsible for.
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Monday 1st December 2008 10:40 GMT Graham Marsden
@Thomas Glover
> Why can't they just focus legislation on people who run the websites for extrem porn?
To quote from the Explanatory Notes produced by the Ministry of Justice:
"The proper functioning of the Internal Market in electronic commerce is ensured by the Internal Market clause, which means that information society services are, in principle, subject to the law of the Member State in which the service provider is established. In turn, the Member State in which the information society service is received cannot restrict incoming services."
In other words, the original idea as proposed in the Longhurst petition to "block access" to sites showing so-called "extreme pornography" would be illegal because these sites are legal in the Member States in which they are established.
That petition also called for the banning of sites "promoting violence against women", but there's never actually been any proof offered that these sites do "promote violence", it's simply a supposition (not backed up with facts) that this sort of material "encourages" violence against women (and, presumably, Female Domination sites "promote violence against men...?)
The fact that members of the BDSM community support the idea of Safe, Sane and, most importantly, *Consensual* play doesn't seem to matter to these people, nor that BDSMers are as opposed to non-consensual violence against others as anyone who signed that petition.
Probably this law will end up being used as a sort of "Consolation Prize" for the Police whereby if they nick you for a crime but are unable to charge you with it, they'll trawl through your computer and see if they can find any "extreme porn" just so they can justify the original arrest...
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Monday 1st December 2008 10:40 GMT David Simpson
Bury Labour and choke Jacki but not during sex (ick!)
While i would like to choke Jacki Smith I certainly would not have sex with her while doing this for fear of breaking the law.
Just when you think the world is a better place and we are moving toward a less censored society, Jacki decides against all scientific data that violent porn causes crime.
But then since when did the government listen to experts ? (Cannabis, WMDs, NATO)
What Gordon and Jacki don't seem to get, even Darling doesn't get it, is after the next election they will all be resigning for giving labour it's lowest seat count in the commons since records began.
Yes Labour WE ALL HATE YOU ! after Afghanistan, Iraq, Data losses, Oil prices, Food prices, The credit crunch, ID Cards, Extreme porn laws. Spoilt for choice when it comes time to vote, BURY THEM !
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
