From AVN

According

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently said that law enforcement must learn to out-smart criminals bent on using the Internet to perpetrate crime, including obscenity.

After the announcement that the FBI had begun forming an anti-obscenity task force to crack down on illegal porn operations, some media reports indicated that some FBI agents were not thrilled with the move.

Gonzales countered that by explaining the reasoning behind FBI involvement and referring to a long history of Congress pushing for prosecution of obscenity cases.

They've made the decision that dollars should be spent to fight obscenity, Gonzales told the Miami Herald. When they appropriate money in order for the department to fight crime, we have an obligation to do that. And that's what we're doing here.

People get the idea that somehow the department with all of its talent can't do more than one thing at a time. In fact, we can fight the war on terror, and at the same time, we can go after corruption, we can go after corporate fraud, we can go after drugs, we can go after violent gun crimes and we can go after obscenity.

From Christian Today

The Premier Christian Media Group and Christianity Magazine have joined forces to call on the BBC to give a clearer definition of the opinions of Christian leaders. The two Christian groups have criticised the BBC for allowing an individual Christian’s opinion be perceived by the public as the views of a majority of Christians.

In a press release the call has been stated to have been prompted after Stephen Green, the National Director of the “fundamentalist movement” Christian Voice was asked to attend the BBC’s political programme Question Time.

In light of the BBC’s reputation of news coverage, the press release expressed fears that the general public would take the BBC’s decision to bring Green on the show as evidence that his views were the opinions of a majority of Christians.

In an open letter to the BBC, the Chief Executive of Premier Christian Media Group, Peter Kerridge said, There are currently 41 million British citizens that consider themselves Christians (according to UK 2001 Census). Around 4 million of these attend church (according to Religious Trends 2005). Various organisations seek to represent practising Christians such as Churches Together and the Evangelical Alliance who speak on behalf of millions while the Christian Voice, is a fundamentalist Christian organisation with only an estimated 1500 followers (Premier state that the Christian Voice were unwilling to divulge membership numbers, but at a recent protest against Jerry Springer; The Opera 1500 supporters were present).

Kerridge continued, Stephen Green has a right to speak freely about his views and the views of Christian Voice, but we believe it is only fair that the public be made aware these are not the views of the majority of Christians in the UK.

Kerridge continued, From previous experience, the BBC are aware of Stephen Green's reputation for making inflammatory comments and we are concerned that the motivation to have him as a panellist on Question Time is to provoke further provocative and extreme comments which BBC viewers may assume represent mainstream Christian opinion.

We believe that the BBC and the Mentorn Television Corporation have a clear responsibility to make sure viewers appreciate that Stephen Green and Christian Voice are a small group and not necessarily representative of the Christian community as a whole.

From Christian Today

The Vatican has demanded that more weight be afforded for churches and Christians in the arrangement of Europe. The Vatican’s “foreign minister” Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, said at the weekend, that Europe’s Christians must work against the pressures to push faith as a private affair into the social background, reported the Swiss Livenet.

Archbishop Giovanni stressed the enormous contribution of the church to the social and cultural life of Europe in the areas of health and education: It would therefore be political err if Europe were to reduce the phenomena of ‘church’ or ‘Christians’ to an internal aspect of human experience, and thereby to a purely private affair.

Lajolo urged that Christians were underrepresented in political committees, the media and in cultural institutions, despite that four fifths of EU citizens are Christians.

The Archbishop said that they are at best tolerated, if not completely pushed back, as if they do not fit to a modern, secularised culture or as if their convictions were not “politically correct”.

Archbishop Lajolo urged that Christians should not allow their potential to influence to be simply pushed out or ignored under the pretext of the so-called Laizity of political society.

There are claimed to be around 368 million Christians currently living in Europe.

From The Nation

Film fans may have noticed that not a single new movie has been released on DVD or VCD over the past two weeks.

Following setbacks due to the transfer of the task of censorship from the Culture Ministry to the Royal Thai Police, more than a hundred home entertainment movies are waiting to be censored, resulting in the lack of new releases on the market.

The delays have led to complaints from the body of movie production companies known as The Thai Motion Picture Industry Association (THAMPA), who say that the setbacks are having a devastating effect on the home entertainment business which THAMPA president Worachart Rodthanom reported is worth Bt10 billion per year.

With more than 300 movies released each month, it usually takes just three days for the censorship board at the Interior Ministry’s Royal Thai Police to censor and give authorisation to distributors to release movies onto the market.

However, it has been two weeks since the shift and not a single movie has passed the new censorship team.

Following discussions among its members, THAMPA will today submit a letter to Interior Minister, ACM Kongsak Wantana, to ask the ministry to take on the censorship work again for at least six months to a year to restore the flow of business. It will also suggest the Culture Ministry’s Culture Watch group, who is responsible for the censorship, take guidance from the Royal Thai Police to enable them to work faster.

Worachart added the delay has caused estimated damage to the industry worth Bt100 million during the past two weeks.

Worachart said the hold-up at the Culture Ministry is being caused by the complicated censorship process. He said censorship teams at the Royal Thai Police were able to authorise the home entertainment products for release onto the market immediately and that there was more than one team. However, he said the Culture Watch group is just one team and has to go through three processes before handing the censored products to Ladda Tangsupachai, Culture Watch director and the sole authority who has the last word on censorship.

We’re really suffering, said Kitti Pakdevijit, a telemovie director. When one movie can’t sell, we can’t move on to making a new one because we haven’t got the money. It’s a domino effect.

However, Culture Minister Uraiwan Thienthong, said the work was not being delayed as much as it appeared and that preparations had been underway since March this year and the facilities were already in place. He said the only problem was the censorship officers, mostly police officers, had failed to opt for transfers due to concerns about losing various benefits including their chances of promotion, if they were relocated.

Don’t assume the worst just yet, said Uraiwan. We just need time to adjust, this is new to all of us. She said she understood the delays were causing damage to the industry which is why she had split the working board into two groups and urged them to work faster.

The recent Ofcom programme guidelines make it crystal clear that only softcore as per that rated 18 by the BBFC can be shown on UK licensed TV. Yet Ofcom have been continually allowing snippets of hardcore material that would be rated R18 by the BBFC. What is more, they refuse to investigate complaints about this deviation from their own published standards.

One can only assume that they have agreed private, non-published guidelines with the adult channels. Presumably because keeping to the commercially unacceptable softcore guidelines would be a commercial wipeout for the UK adult TV industry.

Thanks to Gawth on  The Melon Farmers' Forum

Dear [Gawth]

Complaints about various programmes on adult channels

I refer to your recent complaints about the content of certain programmes transmitted on licensed adult channels.

As you are clearly aware, the Broadcasting Code (Section 1.25) states that BBFC R18 rated films or their equivalent may not be broadcast on UK television. And I note your assertion that - in your view - some particular films may have included very brief shots that might have gone beyond what is normally acceptable in BBFC 18 rated sex works.

I am sure I do not have to explain to you that much of the material broadcast on the licensed adult channels involves films originally certified at R18, and subsequently cut down for UK transmission. The cut down versions are not subsequently submitted to the BBFC for re-classification - nor is there any legal requirement for them to be re-classified for television. In other words, compliance with the broadcasting code is - in the first instance - a matter for the broadcaster alone.

Ofcom, of course,is not a film classification body, and it would be entirely inappropriate for us to seek (and we do not seek) to usurp the role of the BBFC in that regard, and "classify" individual shots. Nevertheless, we expect cut-down films shown on UK television services to be broadly in-line with the national classification system, and not to stray into R18 territory. For that reason, we are engaged in a dialogue with the broadcasters to ensure that they are fully aware of their responsibilities.

In the meantime, I note your previously stated position that you are not personally offended by any of this material, and that you would - in fact - prefer to have access to much stronger material on UK television. In other words, your motives for making these complaints are not straightforward.

I am aware that a small number of specialist internet sites / forums are currently urging contributors to make multiple complaints of this kind for nuisance value - in protest at the continued restrictions on the transmission of R18 material. In such circumstances, Ofcom may take the view that such complaints are vexatious and/or generate an unjustified and greatly disproportionate burden on Ofcom`s limited resources.

Although I have responded to your complaint on this occasion, you should be aware that if Ofcom considers complainants to be vexatious, either due to their submission of multiple complaints or for any other reason, it is Ofcom`s policy not to respond to them.

We will, of course, continue to regulate the adult industry as appropriate and in accordance with our duties under the Act.

Yours sincerely

John Glover
Senior Programmes Executive.

From The Scotsman

A hotel guest who showed an "abhorrent and shocking" video of an Iraqi hostage being beheaded to an appalled worker was yesterday jailed for 60 days.

Subhaan Younis showed Charlotte McClay the footage on his mobile phone while chatting to her in the shop where she worked at the Moat House Hotel in Glasgow.

A concierge assistant reported the matter to the police after spotting McClay looking pale and shaking minutes after she saw the clip.

Lawyers last night said the case highlighted the danger of forwarding graphic material by e-mail or mobile phone - and warned that even "joke" e-mails sent to work colleagues could be viewed as a criminal act.

Younis, who downloaded the clip from the internet, had been staying in the hotel at the time of the offence on 27 September last year.

Defence solicitor Dominic Sellar told Glasgow District Court his client, who was found guilty of breach of the peace last month, accepted the images were "abhorrent and shocking in the extreme". Younis had shown McClay the footage during a conversation about the Iraq war after offering to let her see something that would "cause her a sleepless night", said Sellar.  The solicitor said his client thought McClay realised she was about to see a video of a hostage beheading.

Passing sentence, the magistrate told Younis: You chose to let her view the images on your telephone and told her that she might have nightmares. In my view, the woman had no idea about what she was about to view. No reasonable person might have anticipated viewing such dreadful and distressing images in such circumstances. I struggle to understand why any decent individual would have images showing the degradation and death of another human being, regardless of their race, political or religious persuasion."

Donald Findlay, QC, one of Scotland's top lawyers, said the case served as a warning to people who send work colleagues and friends graphic material by e-mail or mobile phone. He said: What this case shows is that sending a video clip that contains something that is either offensive, distressing or alarming can be considered a breach of the peace.

Media lawyer Campbell Deane, a partner at Bannatyne Kirkwood France in Glasgow, said as far as he was aware the case was the first time that disseminating offensive material has been prosecuted as a breach of the peace under Scots law. He said: The test for breach of the peace is putting somebody in a state of fear and alarm and that depends on the sensitivities of the person concerned.

From Digital Spy

Radio 1 has been rapped for a foul-mouthed tirade on an early evening broadcast.

At the start of Most Punk, broadcast at 7pm on a Thursday night in June, show host Zane Lowe welcomed listeners with: Hello ladies, boys and girls, I thought that you might like to know - in the spirit of punk rock – the following show includes, what we often refer to as language. So if, like me, you are offended by such words and phrases as: arse; bollocks; tit, wank; tit-wank; rotter; mother licker; mother sucker; mother fucker; twat; minge juice; bottler and of course bastard – then you might wish to turn over, or fuck off – thank you.

Two listeners complained to Ofcom over the incident. The BBC maintained that the programme was preceded by a warning and that the "carefully considered" clip was designed to be "thought-provoking".

Broadcasters have the right to transmit, and listeners the right to receive, material which may offend some people but uses strong language to explore artistic and creative themes, said Ofcom, who ruled that R1 had contravened the code. However, the right to deal with such subject matter comes with the responsibility of ensuring material is appropriately scheduled with the potential child audience in mind. While this was a legitimate approach, its application here was seriously misguided.

The regulator added that, although the BBC had pointed out that under 15's accounted for less than 1% of the radio audience at the time, the figure for Radio 1 was a more significant 14%. Given the potential child audience for Radio 1 at this time, we believe that the use of such strong language, with such intensity, at the start of the programme was inappropriate.

Typical tabloid bollox. Presumably the films are distributed electronically as per the Internet (or an Intranet) and hence are not covered by the VRA which governs physical media nor by broadcasting considerations.It is perfectly legal to view R18 type material distributed by the Internet so why shouldn't hotels take advantage. Besides that, a hotel room is considered as an extension of ones home rather than a public space, hence one can buy drinks from the night porter outside licensing hours etc.

I wonder when the Daily Mail will pick up on the challenge of legal hardcore distribution to anybody who wants it via the Internet. And just to make it easier for all, the Internet computer can be hidden away in a neat and easy to use set top box.

Based on an article from Hotels

Major hotel chains are showing hardcore pornography, rated R18 on sets in guests' bedrooms.

The Mail on Sunday claimed that this was enabled by a legal loop hole and that pay-per-view sex movies are on offer in luxury hotel groups including Hilton, Intercontinental and De Vere.

Last night the Government announced a belated inquiry into why the hotels should be immune from a rigidly-enforced blanket ban on the broadcast of hardcore films on terrestrial, satellite and cable television channels.

Ironically, the hotel TV porn system the Government is set to investigate is readily available in at least one of the two Hilton hotels being used by the Prime Minister and Cabinet colleagues at this week's Labour Party Conference in Brighton.

The films now on offer in many British hotels would carry the special 'R18' certificate, which is issued by the BBFC, primarily 'for explicit works of consenting sex between adults.' R18 films can only be purchased by over-18s from licensed sex shops or viewed in specially-licensed cinemas where the age of every ticket purchaser can be verified.

The Hilton Group, whose hotels offer the 'adult' channel at Pounds £12.95 per 24 hours, said yesterday it had consulted the Department for Culture, Media and Sport before making the R18 material available.

When The Mail on Sunday first approached the DCMS to ask what it planned to do to shut down the legal loophole, a spokesman said it was ultimately for the hotel chains to decide what television services they provide for their customers but obviously they have to do operate within the parameters of the law.

The hotels showing hardcore porn insist they can put an electronic block on adult TV channels in guest rooms and say there are onscreen warnings that the viewer is about to access explicit material unsuitable for minors.

Last night a spokeswoman for Hilton, which offers the films in 60 of its 70 UK hotels, said: We started to introduce these films in our hotels in April, which was after some of the other major chains. We took advice from leading counsel and the DCMS before we did so and we are satisfied that it is within the law. Our supplier, Acentic, has also assured us that we are not breaking any regulations. There is also no question of children accessing this material.

There are warnings on every stage of the menu process on the pay-TV screen and when families check in to our hotels it is our policy to ask the parents if they want the adult channel blocked. A spokeswoman for De Vere, which has 19 four-star and fivestar hotels in the UK, confirmed they were also showing R18 films. We understand from our suppliers that it has been legal for two years,'she said.

We offer this service because it has become standard throughout the industry and it is a service that our guests demand. At the Intercontinental Group, which has around 300 hotels in the UK, including the Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza brands, a spokeswoman confirmed it began showing R18 films in the spring of this year after taking legal advice.

In a second statement issued late yesterday afternoon, the DCMS said: 'The Government takes very seriously extreme pornographic images and the protection of children. We are grateful to The Mail on Sunday for drawing this to our attention. It may be that the present legislation creates a loophole for new technologies to provide pornographic material that was not intended under existing legislation. We are therefore examining with the Home Office what action needs to be taken to ensure that the law as intended is complied with. The DCMS spokesman added that he was not aware whether any of the hotel chains contacted them before installing the film system.

From The Guardian

Despite effectively being a home-from-home for violent videogames and adult entertainment, it appears Japan isn't immune from the anti-publicity surrounding Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series. Kanagawa prefecture has already enforced a mandatory 18-rating on the original GTA3 for the PS2, and now Saitama prefecture has followed suit. The game is published by Capcom in Japan, and the publisher challenged Kanagawa's crack-down citing freedom of speech fears and suggesting that the legal restriction undermines existing voluntary ratings. Whether Capcom will now challenge Saitama's decision is unknown, but Capcom will be concerned that action at a national level is looming.

Unlike Europe, Japan - like North America - currently has no national framework for limiting the sale of adult games to minors, though trade body CESA is currently trying to introduce voluntary censorship in order to halt any wider concern which could spark government attention.

I've seen the game myself and it's far too violent and obviously harmful, Saitama governor Kiyoshi Ueda told the Mainichi Daily News. Freedom of expression is one thing, but the wholesome upbringing of youths is also important and this was the only option.

Retailers in Saitama (which borders Tokyo) will be fined 300,000 Yen (about 2,800 USD) if caught selling GTA3 to those under 18 years of age. GTA: San Andreas is currently awaiting a release in Japan, more soon.

...those that speak in his name certainly aren't

From The Guardian

One of Britain's leading conceptual artists has accused the Tate gallery of 'cowardice' after it banned one of his major works for fear of offending some Muslims after the London terrorist bombings.

John Latham's God Is Great consists of a large sheet of thick glass with copies of Islam, Christianity and Judaism's most sacred texts - the Koran, Bible and Talmud - apparently embedded within its surface.

The work was due to go on display last week in an exhibition dedicated to Latham at London's Tate Britain, but gallery officials took the unprecedented decision to veto it because of political and religious sensitivities.

Latham, a star of the Sixties avant garde and maverick role model to a generation of Young British Artists, is so dismayed by the ban that he last night called on Tate Britain to relinquish God Is Great, which he made more than 10 years ago, from its permanent collection and return it to him. The civil rights organisation Liberty also condemned the gallery's decision.

Tate Britain says that it had to take the 'difficult decision' to avoid its motives being misunderstood given the attacks, which killed 52 people in July, and the present political climate. However, it admitted it had not consulted the Metropolitan Police or the Muslim Council of Britain.

Last night Latham who insists that the piece is not anti-Islamic, told The Observer: Tate Britain have shown cowardice over this. I think it's a daft thing to do because if they want to help the militants, this is the way to do it. It's not even a gesture as strong as censorship: it's just a loss of nerve on the part of the administration.

In the exhibition an innocuous sculpture has taken the place of God Is Great, which is in storage at Tate Britain.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, supported the artist. We share his concern,' she said. 'I don't know what precise thought processes were going on at the Tate but I am concerned about the signal this sends at a time when we see free speech quite significantly under threat. I think that after 7 July we need this kind of artistic expression and political expression and discourse and disagreement more than ever, which is why this is worrying. Is three holy books in a piece of glass going to incite controversy? Frankly, whether it does or doesn't, controversy is what we have in a flourishing democracy.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, defended the gallery's decision to hold back the piece. The artist and curator discussed the exhibition and wanted to include it. We had every intention of doing so but in the light of events in London in July we felt we should exercise a little caution, so we altered our plans towards the end of August. It was a very difficult decision, but we made it due to the exceptional circumstances of this summer and in the light of opinions that we value regarding religious sensitivities.

From The Guardian

China announced a fresh crackdown yesterday on the internet amid further revelations of a plan by Hu Jintao, the president, to suppress dissent.

The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest, said a statement from Xinhua, the official news agency. The announcement called for blogs and personal web pages to be directed towards serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests.

The statement was just one of a series of initiatives by the government to root out politically sensitive news from domestic and foreign media. On Thursday a Chinese journalist and former professor was given a seven-year sentence for "inciting subversion" by writing hundreds of articles for banned overseas news websites.

Last month the government tried to implement a scheme to pay journalists according to how much Communist party officials liked, or disliked, their articles. In July a political activist was given five years for posting a punk song on the internet deemed to be subversive, and in April a journalist was sentenced to 10 years for sending an email overseas about restrictions on freedom of speech.

Providing further evidence of an organised national crackdown, the New York Times reported yesterday that Hu called for a "smokeless war" against "liberal elements" in China during a secret leadership meeting in May.

The government employs a cyberspace police rumoured to number 30,000 and has spent lavishly on internet filters. Journalists and human rights organisations say the "smokeless war" amounts to a transformation of the government's tactics from violence, open harassment and the closing of newspapers to more covert methods of maintaining control. Journalists who try write on forbidden topics are rarely attacked directly, but are discredited by charges such as corruption, sexual harassment and extramarital affairs.

They claim confiscation of notes, address books and mobile phones happen secretly beneath a facade that nothing is wrong, so as to defend the image of the party and its leaders. They are trying to safeguard the welfare of the regime, while simultaneously providing for the illusion of a free liberal press, said Law Yuk-kai of the Hong Kong-based Human Rights Monitor. But the internet provides a new way to organise people and is therefore a mounting threat to the government.

From the BBC

Uzma Saeed is campaigning for the repeal of Pakistan's controversial Hudood laws, which rule that all extra-marital sex is illegal.

"Hudood laws are a tool in the hands of men - with these laws they can rape women and be totally unaccountable. Under Hudood if a woman makes a rape allegation she must provide four pious male witnesses or face a charge of adultery herself.

So a woman is in the ridiculous position of having to produce four Muslim adult male eyewitnesses, men who just stood there and watched.  If sex by force is not proved, this woman can be charged with "zina" - sex outside of marriage.

About 60% of women in our jails have been imprisoned as a result of Hudood laws. I know many cases where a husband has wanted to marry again and so accused his wife of illicit relations with another man. A repeal is essential.

I'm working on a legislative watch programme - the first of its kind in Pakistan. We are lobbying parliamentarians, media and political parties to raise awareness.

We are engaging village mullahs in this process. Rather than going on the defensive against extreme religious groups, we are playing on their own pitch.

Many religious scholars are producing research which says that these laws are not in accordance with the Holy Koran. They are political tools to control women in our country".

However mathematically strong encryption is, it will probably prove very weak against those that really want to break the code. A threat to break your legs or bang you in prison for 10 years usually extracts one's password. However a good encryption system will keep the prying eyes at PC World at bay

A meeting is being held to discuss the Government's proposals to criminalise the possession of violent pornography on October the 10th at 19.30 in the Sports bar at Central Station in Kings Cross, all interested parties are welcome. Further details will be announced shortly here and at

www.backlash-uk.org.uk

Paul Tavener from Ofwatch will also be attending this meeting

From NewIndPress

An eight-year-old film by an Indian director is among several Nepali movies that are bearing the brunt of a new censorial attitude for their political overtones.

The new government has apparently banned Tulsi Ghimire's film Balidaan - meaning "sacrifice" in Nepali. Cinemas in Nepal have been asked not to show it, the film's producer Shyam Sapkota said. It has fallen out of favour with the current government for its depiction of a mass movement for democracy 16 years ago.

The plot revolves around a young student who after completing his studies goes to the villages to start a mass movement against the repressive administrative system. Though the film does not spell out the political affiliation of the martyr hero, he is generally regarded as a communist reformer.

One of the songs in the film - "Gaon gaon bato utho, basti basti bato utho" (Arise from the villages, arise from the slums) - has been adopted by the largest communist party in the kingdom, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist with its mass meetings often ending with the rendition of the popular song.

After King Gyanendra sacked prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and seized power by force in February, Nepal's opposition parties say the king is trying to re-introduce the autocratic system of government practised by his father, the late King Mahendra. Besides banning criticism of the palace and the army, the king-headed government has also cracked down on the media.

Now the Nepalese film industry too has been subjected to censorship, film directors say. The government has also banned Aago, a film by director Narayan Puri. Though Aago doesn't name any party by name, it is thought to be influenced by the Maoist insurgency. Aago ran into trouble with the censors even before the royal takeover and was released only after the director agreed to cut out several scenes. Now, despite the cuts, theatres have been asked not to screen the film.

A third film based on the mass movement of 1990 that finally clipped the powers of the palace and ushered in multi-party democracy has also been virtually banned. Bir Ganesh Man Singh, based on the role played by one of the leaders of the movement, Nepali Congress leader Ganesh Man Singh, was screened twice during the National Film Festival organised by the government last month but has run into problems after that. We wanted to screen it in Pokhara city as a charity show, said Bijay Ratna Tuladhar, co-director of the film. However, the authorities 'requested' us not to show it now.

Also banned is director Prakash Sayami's Hatiyar, another film that shows people revolting against an oppressive regime and being forced to take to arms.

From The Sun

The Filipino version of Big Brother has been taken off air for a week - because there is too much sex and nudity.

Head of censorship, Maria Consoliza Laguardia, pulled the plug on the show and wrote to its producers to complain. She said she considered the kissing scene between housemates Chx and Sam, gyrating dances in skimpy bikini, double entendre dialogue and use of skimpy bikini, to be beyond the parental guidance classification and not suitable for television viewing.

The show's producers complied with the suspension but insisted they had stuck to guidelines. They said in an statement: We understand that ‘Pinoy [Filipino] Big Brother’ represents a new, unprecedented expression of Filipino reality, a microcosm of human behaviour that opens valuable studies and insights into social interaction, relationships and discipline.

From Stuff

New Zealand student magazine, Critic, could face legal action following its latest controversial issue.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) has been asked by police, members of the public and the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards to rule on whether the University of Otago magazine's "Offensive Issue" was objectionable.

The issue has attracted an outcry from police and Rape Crisis, who said one article was a "how-to guide" for rapists. The police request is the first step in a possible prosecution.

The company responsible for Critic could be liable for fines of up to $30,000 if prosecution goes ahead, but its chairman of directors is backing editor Holly Walker.

OFLC information unit adviser Deborah Gordon said police could submit an article for classification, and depending on how it was classified, could prosecute under the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act.

Penalties could be "quite severe". However, because Critic published before its publishers were aware it could be objectionable, they are likely to be less so.

Otago University campus Constable Andy Ferguson said he had sent a copy of the magazine to the OFLC to be classified. When I get a response from them I will seek advice from my superiors whether charges will proceed.

The university's deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Gareth Jones, said through his secretary the matter would be discussed at a vice-chancellor's advisory group meeting on Monday.

Is it a coincidence that both the UK and US have decided to 'do something about extreme porn'?

From AVN

According to a story in the Washington Post, the FBI's Washington Field Office, at the urging of the Attorney General's office, began recruiting in late July for a new "anti-obscenity squad" that will allegedly target bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior.

They're going to look for cases like Extreme Associates, the rape and the fisting and all that kind of stuff, summarized attorney Paul Cambria.

But given the squad's stated objective, what are the chances it could accomplish what it wants? It wouldn't hurt the real target, the mainstream adult industry, Cambria opined, because it would just be a bunch of garage people they'd be arresting; you know, people shooting in their backyard garage, putting this stuff out. If they're really interested in the major companies, which they say they are, none of them produce this kind of material, so they're either going to have to expand their horizons or be happy knocking out a bunch of inconsequential operators.

That contradiction isn't lost on the FBI agents themselves. According to anonymous sources within the Bureau who talked to Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, joining the squad would not be considered a career enhancement.

Those assessments jibed with attorney Clyde DeWitt's experiences when he was a prosecutor in Texas: A Justice Department attorney who I knew some years back and who was involved in high-level drug cases in Washington during the '80s, indicated to me that the obscenity unit was the laughing stock of the whole department. Apparently that hasn't changed. Imagine a young FBI recruit, tackling the obstacle course at Quantico and thinking, 'After I have conquered all of the great challenges here, I too will be qualified to spend endless hours sleuthing for images of 'bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior'.

From Reuters

Inspectors for U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Logan International Airport say they are trying to keep bizarre pornography out of the state.

Our main focus is on terrorism, Ted Woo, spokesman for the CBP's Boston office, told the Boston Herald, but this is something our agents are definitely on the lookout for. If it's so-called normal pornography, it's not going to be an issue, especially if it's for personal use.

The confiscated material is sent to U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan's office, where it is ultimately destroyed unless someone is willing to fight for the sordid contraband in court.

Sullivan's spokeswoman Samantha Martin said no one caught with porn involving consenting adults has been prosecuted in recent memory. Virtually any material exploiting children, however, is expressly illegal.

The Washington Post reported this week FBI headquarters has put out a call to agents to join a new national anti-obscenity squad targeting the manufacturers and purveyors of porn.

Based on articles from AVN

Several churches throughout the state of California have announced that they will take part in an event called “National Porn Sunday,” which is intended to raise concerns and start a dialog around the issues surrounding “the problem of pornography.” The one-day, nation-wide event, scheduled for Oct. 9, will attack “America’s dirty little secret” through what is termed an “explosive” program designed for churches.

Mike Foster and Craig Gross, the nutters and founders of XXXchurch.com, will officially announce the event on Monday when they drive their Porn Sunday Message Mobile—a 20 x 10-foot rolling billboard—down Sunset Boulevard in front of the Hollywood Hustler store.

Foster and Gross have stirred up a bit of a fuss with their Web site, and their program for Porn Sunday will follow suit with their offering of the National Porn Sunday Kit, which features books, software, Web sites, speakers, access to the best recovery facilities in the country and, of course, Foster and Gross’s feature-length documentary film Missionary Positions. It is scheduled for wide release following Porn Sunday.

We have to respond to this devastating problem, Gross posits in a statement released Friday. We are sick of watching people lose everything to porn, and the church needs to lead this effort. We hope National Porn Sunday will become the launching pad for the discussion about pornography.

It is expected that seven churches throughout the state of California, as well as 70-plus churches across the world, will participate in National Porn Sunday.

From Christian Today

The Evangelical Alliance and the African & Caribbean Evangelical Alliance in calling on its combined membership, consisting of more than a million Christians, to protest next month against the proposed Racial & Religious Hatred legislation.

Rev Joel Edwards, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance is firmly opposed to the Bill as it stands. (www.micahchallenge.org)

The Alliances are urging their members to take time off work next month to as part of the protest, and calling for huge numbers of people to gather outside the Houses of Parliament on 11 October, the date that the Bill’s first full debate is scheduled to take place at the House of Lords.

More than 100 Christian groups, churches and denominations are planning a full weekend of prayer and protest against the legislation, which has been seen by many critics as a threat to freedom of speech as well as a threat to evangelism for religious groups.

The weekend will commence with a prayer rally taking place near the famous ‘Speakers’ Corner’ in Hyde Park in central London on Saturday 8 October 2005 at midday. The Evangelical Alliances are calling for as many people to gather for this as possible, and this will be followed by a day of prayer in local churches throughout the nation on Sunday 9 October.

The protest will conclude with a mass protest rally on Tuesday 11 October in Parliament Square at 1pm.

We continue to oppose this Bill as a matter of principle because it affects the freedom of speech of every UK citizen.

The Chief Executive Officer of the ACEA, Rev Katei Kirby said, The impact of the proposed legislation will form part of the legacy that we will leave for our children and our children’s children. This is an opportunity for the Church to unite with one voice in prayer and protest to make a difference.

The Evangelical Alliance is in unity with many other faith organisations and groups, as well as entertainers and secularists, that fear the proposed legislation will greatly restrict the right to freedom of speech in Britain.

Despite large protests, the legislation has already passed through the House of Commons, and now it just remains for the House of Lords to approve the Bill for it to come into effect as law in Britain.

The General Director of the Evangelical Alliance, Rev Joel Edwards said, We continue to oppose this Bill as a matter of principle because it affects the freedom of speech of every UK citizen.  We are committed to defending religious liberty and precious freedoms like free speech. This protest is about pulling people together to be a united voice in opposition to this proposed law.

Backing this view, Don Horrocks, the Head of Public Affairs at the Evangelical Alliance stated, Many observers believe the Government is so committed to getting the measures through Parliament that the Bill will inevitably pass into statute law. However, opposition to the Bill, even at this late stage, is not futile. It is quite possible that the Lords may press for amendments that the Government will feel obliged to accept and which could make the Bill less destructive. I therefore urge everyone who believes in the principles of free speech to do everything they can to join the thousands of Christians and others at the rally in Parliament Square on Tuesday.

From News From Russia

With Sania Mirza, a national tennis hero after her recent success in the US Open, is now surrounded by an unprecedented security apparatus after Islamic groups threatened her over her tennis skirts, which they say "offended" the religious sentiments of Muslims.

Hundreds of uniformed security agents and plain-clothes officers including women, were stationed at the Netaji stadium in the Indian city of Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) where she competed in the Sunfeast Open international tennis tournament.

As well as private security staff, the Muslim tennis star has also been assured of 24-hour police protection, according to a local police executive. Anywhere she goes she will also be followed by a commando, ready to shield her against any possible actions by militant organisation, Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind or other Islamic groups that have threatened Mirza for her on-court apparel.

Certain Islamic leaders have said that if she showed up in her usual tennis skirts that leave her legs uncovered together with her tight-fitting t-shirts, she will be prevented from playing.

A women should wear a veil, without showing her hands or feet, according Maulana Siddidullah Chowdhry, the secretary of the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind group, and in Islam, there is not specific indication as to what should be worn to the market or when playing.

Police in the state say that they are not taking any chances this time after the incident some months ago in which the Bangladeshi writer, Taslima Nasreen, was stopped by such groups as she was addressing a seminar on fundamentalism.

Based on an article from Refused Classification

The complaints made against the TV showing of Big Brother Uncut back in June have resulted in the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) finding that C10 breached the code of practice.

From an ACMA press release:

ACMA  has found Network Ten licensees in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney breached the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice for broadcasts of Big Brother Uncut.

Breaches were found in two of the three episodes of the program investigated by ACMA. The breaches were of clause 2.4 of the code, which requires that material be classified in accordance with the Television Classification Guidelines in the code.

Big Brother Uncut is classified MA, meaning it is suitable for viewing only by persons aged 15 years and over and may only be screened after 9 pm. The investigation found material was screened that was in excess of the MA classification.

Other material broadcast in Big Brother Uncut was considered to approach the limit of content permitted at the MA classification level.

MA classified material is the strongest permitted on free-to-air television. Because of this, broadcasters are obliged to exercise particular care in selecting material for this category, said Lyn Maddock, Acting ACMA Chair. ACMA has found that on two of the occasions it investigated, Network Ten did not take sufficient care in selecting material for Big Brother Uncut.

One breach, in the episode broadcast on 30 May 2005, involved what ACMA considered a gratuitous and demeaning portrayal of nudity. This scene depicted a male participant in the program massaging a female participant’s shoulders. The female was unaware that the male’s penis was exposed and near the back of her head.

The other breach, in the 13 June 2005 episode, was for very coarse language that was not suitable for persons aged 15 years or over. A group of males composed a song containing references to fetishistic and degrading sexual behaviour. The impact of the language was such that it was not considered suitable for 15 year olds.

ACMA is aware that Network Ten has taken steps to review the program’s production process in response to criticism about some of the behaviour of male participants in the 2005 series. Network Ten has offered to advise ACMA of the outcomes of that review including any new procedures that may be implemented as a result.

While welcoming the steps already taken by the licensee, ACMA will further discuss appropriate measures with Network Ten. Action requested of Network Ten by ACMA will be geared towards ensuring future breaches of the MA classification provisions do not occur, said Lyn Maddock.

If Network Ten fails to provide appropriate undertakings, ACMA will consider imposing a licence condition on the Network Ten licensees.

From Reuters

A Paris-based media watchdog released a handbook on Thursday to help cyber-dissidents and bloggers avoid political censorship in countries as far apart as China, Iran, Vietnam and Cuba.

The guide, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) with the backing of the French government, identifies bloggers as the "new heralds of free expression" and offers advice on how to set up a blog and run it anonymously.

Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure, wrote Julien Pain, head of RSF's Internet Freedom Desk. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.

The "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents" can be downloaded from the RSF website, www.rsf.org,  and the media organization says it is available in English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Farsi.

The guide is based on technical advice from experienced bloggers and experts, and provides personal accounts by bloggers such as Arash Sigarchi, who received a 14-year-jail sentence in Iran last February but is free pending an appeal.

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution, RSF said on its Web site. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they're tremendous tools of freedom of expression.

The handbook offers advice on how to establish credibility by observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

One chapter offers advice on technical ways to get around censorship. Others feature bloggers' experiences from such countries as Nepal, Iran, Bahrain and Hong Kong.

Publication of the handbook follows moves in some countries to crack down on Internet use.

RSF said countries which were trying to control what their citizens read and do online included China, Vietnam, Iran, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

Based on an article from Refused Classification

An Australian film based loosely on the disappearance of Peter Falconio and the Ivan Milat murders was given an R rating by the OFLC ahead of its November release.

But Roadshow Films, the local distributor of Wolf Creek, appealed against the rating decision so the horror film can be seen by a younger audience.

However Roadshow Films failed in their attempt to get the R18+ rating of  Wolf Creek lowered to MA15+. Once again the Review Board has deemed it necessary to change the consumer advice. It has gone from 'High Level Violence, Coarse Language, Adult Themes' to 'High Level Realistic Violence, Strong Coarse Language'.

A 3-member panel of the Classification Review Board determined, in a unanimous decision, that the Australian film, Wolf Creek, is classified R 18+ with the consumer advice, “High level realistic violence, Strong coarse language.”

Unlike typical horror movies, Wolf Creek does not employ the usual tension-releasing devices, nor the stylized approaches to depictions of violence, instead striving for a tone of realism that takes it out of the realm of fantasy, said Classification Review Board Deputy Convenor, The Hon Trevor Griffin. This very realistic tone results in a film of high impact.

Griffin also said that in the opinion of the Classification Review Board, the level of realism created by the documentary-style approach heightens the impact of the violence, which is frequent and, in some scenes, prolonged.

From Mediawatch-UK

Commenting about the availability of hardcore on 3G phones, John Beyer, director of mediawatch-uk said: The complete answer to this problem is to strengthen the law against pornography so that much of the imagery that is now available becomes illegal in line with Parliament’s intention in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.  The 3G mobile phones make more urgent the need for an international agreement on unacceptable Internet content.

From The Herald Tribune

With the advent of advanced cellular networks that deliver full-motion video from the Internet - and the latest wave of phones featuring large, bright color screens - the U.S. pornography industry is eyeing the cellphone, like the videocassette recorder before it, as a lucrative new vehicle for distribution.

In recent months, that prospect has produced a cadre of entrepreneurs hoping to follow the lead of counterparts in Europe and Asia, where consumers already spend tens of millions of dollars a year on phone-based pornography.

The major American cellular carriers have so far been adamant in their refusal to sell pornography from the same content menus on which they sell ring tones and video games. But there are signs that they may soften their stance. The cellular industry's major trade group is drafting ratings for mobile content - akin to those for movies or video games - signaling that phones, too, will be a subject of viewer discretion.

Roger Entner, a wireless-industry analyst for Ovum, a market research firm, said the emergence of content ratings, coupled with easier use of the Internet on phones, made it inevitable that phone-based pornography would become a fixture. It has every component that has proven conducive to the consumption of adult entertainment - privacy, easy access, and, on top of it, mobility.

For the carriers, it is a tricky proposition. Offering pornography would stir a tempest over indecency and possible pressure from regulators or Congress. But conceding the field to third parties, capable of reaching consumers through Web browsers in phones, would leave millions of dollars on the table.

At present, sales of pornography over mobile phones in the United States amount to virtually nothing. But cellphone commerce is on the rise, with sales of ring tones alone expected to reach $453 million this year, according to the Yankee Group, a research firm. The company estimates that by 2009, sales of pornography for phones will hit $196 million, still meager compared with a projected $1.2 billion for ring tones.

But the likelihood that pornography will be increasingly accessible by phone has children's advocacy groups mobilizing. This month, the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, a Christian nonprofit group, met with leaders of the wireless industry to voice concern that phones could provide minors with all-too-easy access to inappropriate material. The Internet hit us blindsided, said Jack Samad, a senior vice president with the advocacy group, referring to the slow reaction of children's advocacy groups to the advent of online pornography. We are attempting to stay ahead of the curve with regard to mobile phones, pressing cellphone carriers to give parents the ability to block access.

The Federal Communications Commission has its own concerns, said David Fiske, a spokesman for the U.S. regulator. The commission takes very seriously the issue of inappropriate material reaching cellphones that are in the hands of children, he said. But he declined to comment on what actions the commission might take.

To some extent, though, the agency's hands are tied in that mobile phone carriers, like other telecommunications companies, are not responsible for what Internet sites consumers visit. But the carriers could be held accountable, experts said, if they take part in selling pornography to minors.

From BetaNews

MSN plans to remove mature and adult rated communities from its MSN Groups service in late November. The groups would be moved to a third-party site, WorldGroups, who will handle mature and adult categorized groups for the service after the transition.

Users will be unable to create or change a group's classification as "adult" or "mature" after October 19. This would be followed by a lockdown of content on these groups on November 2, and then removal of the groups from MSN on November 28.

At that time, it will be prohibited to either post or upload anything that expresses pornography or obscenity according to a draft of the announcement obtained by BetaNews. MSN services are used by a broad audience and we need to ensure that content is appropriate for all viewers, the draft reads. To meet these needs, MSN prohibits content and language that is sexually explicit from many MSN sites. We are also unable to provide access to additional adult content and services desired by many of our users."

WorldGroups will offer many of the same features that MSN Groups offered, however users will have unlimited storage as well as streaming video capabilities, privacy controls, and opportunities to use the groups to generate revenue.

Two types of communities will be offered: Adult WorldGroups, which will allow for the posting of mature content; and Unfiltered, which does not carry the restrictions on dialogue that are directed at an adult audience.

MSN's move would follow Yahoo's shuttering of user chats in June. A report on a local TV station in Houston showed that many of the chat rooms were being used for illegal purposes, which prompted several large companies to pull their advertising from the service.

Based on an article from the BBC

An Israeli couple being married in India have found that you may not kiss the bride - the pair were fined $22 for indecency for their wedding embrace.

A court in Rajasthan imposed the fine after Alon Orpaz and Tehila Salev had decided to get married in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Pushkar. The couple, who had met in India while travelling separately, paid the 1,000-rupee fine for "committing an act of indecency" to avoid a 10-day jail sentence.

The apologetic couple said they were unaware public kissing was banned.

Predictably tolerant priests were offended when the couple kissed and hugged during the chanting of religious verses. Some of the priests were upset by their actions at the wedding and filed a case claiming Hindu sentiments had been hurt. SN Garg, president of the Priests and Pilgrimage Society, said: It is a matter of concern for the priest community. We want the government to ensure that tourists visiting Pushkar must respect Indian culture. Garg said the couple had now been forgiven after they apologised for their behaviour.

The couple said their public embrace was done according to their own culture and was not intended to be hurtful.

Pushkar, on the banks of Pushkar Lake, is a popular (presumably now a little less popular) pilgrimage spot for tourists, Hindus & nutters.

From an editorial  on Yorkshire Today

A man attempting to walk the length of Britain stark naked for a second time was arrested once again -- seconds after walking out of jail, police revealed on Monday.

"Naked Rambler" Stephen Gough was stopped by officers as he left the gates of Edinburgh's Saughton prison on Friday and taken to the city's Sheriff Court. The former royal marine was released on bail and will appear in court in December.

He was thrown in jail on September 9 after being found guilty of breaching of the peace just south of the Scottish capital on September 1.

On Monday, Gough vowed that the Naked Rambler will not be stopped in his quest to make it to John O'Groats on the north-east tip of Scotland, accompanied this time by his girlfriend: I think the thing that we are standing for is really something everyone should be concerned about -- how we feel about ourselves. We talk about human rights and the dignity of man, and yet man in his natural state is locked up. It's crazy. It does not make sense. We are supposed to be reasonable, our justice system is based on reason, and yet I'm being put away as if I'm some sort of disgusting animal. I'm just a human being.

Public nudity is illegal in Britain but that has not stopped Gough attempting a second trek wearing nothing but boots, a hat and a rucksack.

He walked the 1 363km length of Britain from Land's End in south-west England to John O'Groats in 2003 and 2004 and was arrested 14 times during the trip, serving two jail terms.

The journey to mainland Britain's most northerly settlement should take another two weeks -- providing he is not arrested again.

Perhaps the will destroy their own country as effectively as they have destroyed Iraq

From Monsters & Critics

The Bush administration reportedly is getting help from the FBI in its war on porn, a campaign that has also become the subject of mischievous humor.

Early last month, the FBI`s Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad, reports The Washington Post. The initiative has been designated as one of the top priorities of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, says the Post.

I guess this means we`ve won the war on terror, one exasperated FBI agent told the newspaper. We must not need any more resources for espionage.

The squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against 'manufacturers and purveyors' of pornography directed at consenting adults.

The effort comes at a time when popular acceptance of hard-core pornography has come a long way, says the report.

The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation`s top priority remains fighting the war on terrorism, said Justice Department`s Brian Roehrkasse. However, it is not our sole priority. In fact, Congress has directed the department to focus on other priorities, such as obscenity.

From The Independent, Thanks to Marc
See also CleanFilms, CleanFlicks & ClearPlay

What are decent-minded middle-American Christian conservatives to do if they abhor sex, bad language, illicit drug use and gut-spilling violence but still have an urge to see Saving Private Ryan? Or Goodfellas? Or The Amityville Horror? The beginnings of an answer came a few years ago with the advent of CleanFlicks, a kitchen-sized Utah company that decided to offer videos and DVD for rental - after they had been edited to remove all content likely to be offensive to the local Mormon population.

Today, that kitchen-sized enterprise has turned into a veritable industry, spanning numerous states and attracting the attention of both lawyers and politicians all the way to Washington. CleanFlicks is going from strength to strength, offering its services on a monthly subscription basis much like the wildly successful mainstream company Netflix. And a second, even more sophisticated, company called ClearPlay, also based in Utah, has sprung up.

ClearPlay doesn't edit the films as such, but rather offers a series of filters so individual consumers can decide how much sex or violence they want to tolerate. Want to see a gritty urban drama like the recently released Crash, which examines racism in Los Angeles, but without the "implied premarital sex"? Just press the appropriate button on your DVD menu and you can relax in the knowledge that all suggestions of illicit nookie have been purged ahead of time.

The service has not only proved popular in conservative states such as Utah. There is some evidence it appeals to a much broader range of movie consumers, particularly families concerned about the content Hollywood is throwing at their children, even at a tender age. The sanitising companies have even set to work on Shrek and Shrek II, finding the animated smash hits replete with squirm-inducing sexual innuendo and language that may not be cursing as such but is still too salty for their puritan tastes.

The film industry, as might be expected, has not reacted well. Starting three years ago, when CleanFlicks started making its first serious commercial inroads, the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild have been railing at what they see as a straightforward infringement of intellectual property.

For while their work is modified and edited all the time - for broadcast on television or on commercial plane flights, for example - the difference is that these modifications are done with their permission, through formal licensing agreements. CleanFlicks and ClearPlay don't ask for permission from anyone, arguing instead that their adjustments and amendments fall under the category of "fair use".

The two sides quickly fell into a predictable legal dispute, which dragged on until earlier this year when the Bush administration itself decided to get involved and passed the Family Movie Act, which sanctioned what the sanitisers were doing and was signed into law explicitly to make the legal challenge from the Hollywood bigwigs vanish into the judicial ether.

As far as the White House was concerned, the law was an easy way of appealing to the Republican Party's fundamentalist Christian base and bashing one of its favourite targets - Hollywood's free-speech liberals. Quite a few Democrats jumped on board as well, partly because of a perceived need to defer to the conservative "family values" agenda and partly because the Bill also embraced a handful of anti-piracy provisions that the film industry was keen to see entered into law.

The hypocrisies of excessive puritanism have been an irresistible spectator sport for centuries, not just in the United States, and the advent of the DVD profanity police is no exception. Part of the fun of visiting the ClearPlay website, over and above the intriguing categories available for censorship (what, one wonders, qualifies as a "non-graphic injury/wound"?), is seeing where the content police were forced to give up. The site's listing for Crash, for example, includes this line: "Filter settings not available: ethnic and social slurs." In a film preoccupied to the point of obsession with racist attitudes and behaviour, one would think not. But surely someone somewhere will still take offence? The CleanFlicks site ("It's about choice!" screams the banner headline) is even funnier when it delves into the technical minutiae of censorship. The list of profanities the company says it systematically excises includes "the B-words, the H-word when not referring to the place, the D-word, the S-word, the F-word etc ..." It also includes references to deity (G-word and JC-words etc), only when these words are used in a "non-religious context". One could spend an afternoon figuring out exactly what all these forbidden terms are, or else marvel at how conversant those easily offended clearly are with the objects of their offence.

Saving Private Ryan

The notorious 24-minute opening scene involving D-Day death and gore on the Normandy beaches is made far more palatable, as is the generally brutal depiction of battle throughout. Despite director Steven Spielberg's insistence that these images are critical in showing the sacrifice of troops and the true nature of warfare, CleanFlicks finds them too much to take.

The Godfather

In the sanitised version of The Godfather, Sonny Corleone (played by James Caan) does not die in a hail of bullets pounding relentlessly into his car. He just... well, he's sort of there one minute and gone the next. And the notoriously gory horse's head bit? Eighteen seconds is cut from one of the most famous scenes in recent cinema history

Opinion from Ian G

The Violent Pornography Consultation seems to be coming under attack from all quarters and I wonder just why this is? After much consideration I'm beginning to see that the whole premise behind this piece of nonsense is simply criminalizing material on the basis of taste.

The question from the consultation that really eats at me is this: In the absence of conclusive research results as to its possible negative effects, do you think that there is some pornographic material which is so degrading, violent or aberrant that it should not be tolerated?

As I've stated many times on the forum, and what will be the main point in my response to the consultation, is that this question is extremely leading because the first statement belies the fact that all evidence shows that there are beneficial effects from such material. However, that point aside, the question then simply asks a matter of opinion based on personal sexual tastes and preferences. What we have here is criminalization of material based purely on one's feelings toward that material. At least with legal obscenity there has to be some indication that the material possesses the power to corrupt and deprave, which most juries take as actual harm being present or perpetrated against the participants. But the material now being targeted is make-believe fantasy violence that many people enact in the course of their own sex lives.

This is clearly an attempt at implementing thought crime. If passed into law it will be an utter affront to Freedom of Expression. As I said on the forum some weeks ago, I personally dislike piercings and tattoos and this proposed bill is tantamount to making it a criminal offence to own piercings and tattoos based on my personal feelings of such things. Indeed, with the terms of reference being used it could be argued that genital piercings or intimate tattoos are sexualised GBH as they do 'break the skin'. Pictures of such things could become criminal to own and view!

This doesn't seem to represent a 'slippery slope' as many Melon Farmers have stated, its more like a vertical drop into puritanical totalitarianism. The Government are not elected to dictate what the people can or cannot do. They are supposed to represent our views and form sound policy to represent the majority of opinion and ensure no discrimination based on sexual orientation, sex, beliefs, age or colour marginalizes any section of our society. Clearly this proposal goes against all those principles. It is not even necessary, there is no pressing social need and, there is a plethora of evidence to show that such law would actually create more harm in our society. There's no way any of this can be justified and so it cannot in any way be Just. I'm afraid this Government have turned into a bunch of control freaks who simply want to pass laws which allow them to pry into people's lives like Peeping Toms and persecute anyone who doesn't tow their puritanical line.

Nobody is going to take seriously the arrogant views of someone who thinks they know better than you how to bring up children. Perhaps his views would be better heeded if he suggested advice rather than threat.

From Scoop

The New Zealnd Office of Film and Literature Classification and the Department of Internal Affairs have released a research report showing that the majority of teenagers surveyed had played computer games that cannot legally be supplied to them. The report, Underage Gaming Research, was released today and is based on a survey of 331 secondary school students aged 15 to 17.

The survey was designed and analysed by UMR Research Limited. The two agencies commissioned the report after receiving anecdotal evidence of underage gaming. While the results of the survey cannot be used to show what proportion of young people in the whole country have played restricted games, they indicate that underage access to these games is common.

The survey asked the participants whether or not they had played any of the 26 games listed in the questionnaire. Twenty-four of the games listed were R18 and are therefore illegal to supply to the subjects of the study.

Two of the games, Manhunt and Postal 2, were objectionable and therefore illegal for anyone to possess or supply. The study found that 62% of participants had played at least one restricted or banned game. The Grand Theft Auto series were the most popular games amongst those surveyed. A small number of subjects reported having played the two banned games Manhunt and Postal 2. In almost half of cases, the young people had bought the games themselves while, in a further third of cases, parents had bought them.

The results suggest that some parents and retailers are illegally supplying restricted games to underage players. Chief Censor Bill Hastings said the Classification Office doesn’t ban or restrict games lightly. We do it to protect the greater public good from injury caused by young people playing games developed for an adult audience.

Only about 10 per cent of all games on the market are restricted, meaning that there plenty of games available that are suitable for young people. I encourage parents to take an interest in their children’s game playing and to ensure that they only play games that are legally available to them.

Parents who allow their underage children to play restricted games are breaking the law and doing their children a disservice. Mr Hastings said. Department of Internal Affairs Deputy Secretary Andrew Secker said that the Department's focus is on the stores selling and hiring games. Censorship Inspectors carry out inspections at between 400 and 500 stores each year.

The industry has suggested that it would be helpful to have point of sale material from the Department about the law. We are producing that and providing it to stores free of charge,  Secker said. We have found that stores responded well when we raised any concerns after inspections.

We have not yet prosecuted any stores but that is an option if problems continue. The Department of Internal Affairs has prosecuted a New Zealander trying to distribute Manhunt in this country. The Manhunt prosecution seems to have greatly helped with compliance. Since that case, sellers contacted by the Department have cooperated very quickly.

From The Guardian

Theatres across Britain have united in defiance against a threat of prosecution from an evangelical Christian group to save the national tour of the controversial musical Jerry Springer the Opera.

Christian Voice, which organised street vigils on the evening of the BBC broadcast of the opera in January, successfully petitioned to have Arts Council funding of the regional tour axed after damning the show as "blasphemous".

It sent letters to theatres up and down the country which said: We are at this moment preparing charges of the criminal offence of blasphemy for service upon those responsible for broadcasting the show on BBC2, and those responsible for staging it at the Cambridge Theatre. Should any regional theatre stage Jerry Springer the Opera this autumn, we shall be looking to prosecute them as well.

Some theatres bowed to the pressure and the national tour suffered a 30% loss of venues as a result. Yesterday, however, it was announced that the tour will reopen in Plymouth on January 23 and tour cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Liverpool, Cardiff, and Nottingham.

Richard Thomas, the show's composer and co-writer, said: I am overjoyed Jerry Springer the Opera is going on tour in spite of such extreme protest. I am also buying a flak jacket. And sticking close to the shadows. The show's producer, Jon Thoday, said: I'm delighted that a small minority have not prevented the public from seeing this brilliant show. Freedom of speech and artistic freedom have prevailed.

 The musical has been seen by 425,000 theatregoers and had 2.4 million viewers when it was broadcast on BBC2 on January 8, a record figure for a televised musical or opera.

From The Guardian

The week the new president of Iran was sworn in, bloggers suddenly found themselves isolated: their blogrolls (a list of favorite blogs on the side of their own) had disappeared. Why? Because blogrolling.com, the popular website that provided the free service, was being filtered by all ISPs in Iran.

Internet censorship officially started almost a year ago when a three-member committee - later a five-member committee - was formed to watch Iranian websites and blogs and decide which ones the ISPs should filter. Ever since, aside from millions of pornographic websites, hundreds of Iranian blogs and websites have become inaccessible through their normal web addresses. (Proxies are hugely popular, before these are themselves filtered.) A scientific study partly sponsored by Harvard University suggested many of these websites and blogs were political.

However, in the past few months online services such as Orkut (Google's social networking service), the website statistics service Nedstats and Flickr (Yahoo's photography community website) have been filtered by major ISPs. Nobody knows whether it was the committee for internet filtering that banned them or the judiciary, which has recently - despite having a member on the committee - started to order ISPs directly to censor the sites.

Frustrated and hopeless, Iranian bloggers feel threatened more than ever now blogrolling.com's service has become inaccessible. As one blogger wrote, they see this a "deliberate assault" on the extremely large network of Iranian bloggers, which has effectively become the symbol of free speech in a country where the state has total control of the press, TV and radio.

With the ultra-conservative president now in power, everyone is waiting to see how the communications and information technology minister deals with Persian-language political content on the internet. Will the authorities embrace the internet as an influential source of news and information, as they did during the election campaigns with their numerous official and unofficial campaign websites? Or they will intensify filtering and, as conservative bloggers have suggested, start to go after those who write weblogs "insulting" the regime's officials and religious figures?

After all, one blogger, Mojtaba Samienejad, is still in jail serving a two-year sentence for "insulting the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic", and two other bloggers, Mojtaba Lotfi and Morteza Abdollahinasab, were recently released after spending months in jail for the same reason.

From Acta on The Melon Farmers' Forum

Would David Croneberg's History of Violence then be illegal under new proposed legislation?

Movie stars VIGGO MORTENSEN and MARIA BELLO were left battered and bruised after shooting a hard-hitting sex scene on a wooden stairwell in new DAVID CRONENBERG film A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

The couple, who play man and wife in the gritty drama, spent weeks preparing for and talking about the scene, but had no idea it would leave them in so much pain.

From email group www.smartgroups.com/groups/Backlash

The definition of GBH in law isn't the same as the one the CPS uses when deciding which of the assault offences to prosecute. Anything which breaks the skin is technically GBH - this will result in images the Home Office has no intention of criminalising being prohibited. I'm then going to use the basis of my response to the Home Office as the letter to my MP - I've a Labour MP and there might be some mileage in pointing out how illogical his own government is being.

I currently think it's important to point out exactly how wide the proposed law is - it's criminalising a lot of stuff that I don't think most MPs will realise falls within the category of 'extreme pornographic material'.

From The Telegraph

Mary Whitehouse dubbed it as the most depraved play in theatrical history and its depiction of male rape and mutilation sparked one of the most notorious legal battles of the last century. But now the The Romans In Britain has been labelled as funny, sensitive, and beautiful by the actor responsible for the play's first professional revival in 25 years.

Sam West, the recently appointed artistic director of Sheffield Theatres said: We are reviving Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain because it is an epic, funny and beautiful play which was sadly eclipsed by controversy when it was first staged 25 years ago.

West's description of the play, which compares the Roman invasion of Britain with the troubles in Northern Ireland, would seem at odds with the nutter furore sparked when it premiered at the National Theatre in 1980.

In the most notorious scene Roman soldiers find a group of naked, young Britons by the side of a river, and rape one of the party in view of the audience after killing his friends.

The scene sent shock waves through the theatrical establishment and led to calls for the National's public funding to be stopped. Mary Whitehouse, then head of the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVLA), brought a private prosecution against Michael Bogdanov, the play's director under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act.

The law was used by Whitehouse's lawyers to claim that Bogdanov had procured an act of gross indecency with another male in a public place. The director was defended by Lord Hutchinson, who had presented the case for the defence in the notorious Lady Chatterley obscenity trial of 1961. Although Whitehouse's prosecution subsequently collapsed, no professional theatre company has re-staged the play possibly for fear of another day in court.

John Beyer, the director of Mediawatch UK, the successor to the NVLA, said he could not see the point of a revival and he urged the theatre to be mindful of existing legislation. Any production of this play has to abide by the law of the land. I do not accept that the male rape scene is acceptable just because the author of the play says it is symbolic of the rape of Britain.

Callers to the theatre's box office are being advised that the play is not suitable for children under 14.

Thanks to Mick

It appears the revised version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be once again hitting shelves in Australia with an MA (15+) rating:

www.oflc.gov.au/content.html?n=44&p=34&sTitle=grand+theft+auto&record=207350

From Tom's Hardware Guide

California lawmakers approved Assembly Bill 1179, which prohibits 'extremely violent' video games from being sold to minors and requires large labels to be affixed to retail boxes. Violators can be hit with up to $1000 in fines, per infraction. The bill now heads to Governor Schwarzenegger's desk and he has 30 days to either sign or veto the bill.

AB1179, formerly known as AB450, was sponsored by Speaker pro Tem Dr. Leland Yee (Democrat) and passed by a 65 to 7 vote. The bill will hit retailers with up to a $1000 fine if they willingly sell violent games to minors. In addition, AB1179 requires a two inch by two inch label with a white 18 (outlined in black) to be affixed to the retail boxes of those games. Interestingly, only the retailer will be fined, and not the sales clerk. Also, if the manufacturer forgets to label the box, the store will not be fined.

In AB1179, violent games are games where the player has an option of killing, maiming,
dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being in a 'shockingly atrocious manner', but it is unclear who will determine what content will fit that definition. Yee, who is also a Child Psychologist, believes that violent games can have a dramatic and detrimental effect on children and his bill has the backing of child advocacy groups, like Common Sense Media.

Adam J. Keigwin, spokesperson for Leland Yee, also does not think the bill encourages censorship. We are not asking them to be less violent. They have a first amendment right to make or produce what they want, but we just want them to sell to adults, says Keigwin. Keigwin also thinks that the current ESRB rating system 'doesn't have any teeth' and that Mature-rated games are routinely sold to children.

Based on an article from the Financial Express

A bill arming the authorities concerned with sweeping powers to supposedly 'clean' the cultural arena by stopping the screening of pornographic and uncensored films and those laced with obscene scenes was placed in the Jatiya Sangsad Sunday.

Information Minister M Shamsul Islam introduced 'The Censorship of Films (Amendment) Bill 2005', saying that violators of the law shall be punished with imprisonment of one year to three years or with fines that may extend to Tk 10,000, or with both. And there may be a further fine that may come to Tk 5,000 for each day if the offence continued after the punitive measures once taken.

A provision of the bill says no suit, prosecution or other legal proceedings shall lie against the government, the Film Censor Board, chairman, member or any other officer of the Board in respect of anything done or intended to be done in good faith under the proposed Act.

Another provision states that no courts shall grant an injunction or make any interim order in respect of any order passed by the Board without giving the Board an opportunity of being heard.

The bill was sent to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Ministry for further scrutiny, asking the watchdog to submit its vetting report within a month.

I have been informed of another discussion thread starting up at

http://bgafd.co.uk/forum/read.php?f=2&i=73124&t=73124

Let me know of any other forums on the subject and I will get them listed here

Perhaps Christian literature should carry a similar warning: Millions have been killed, maimed and tortured as a result of centuries of nutter addiction to intolerance

Based on an article from Refused Classification

PRO-family nutters; conservative and Christian nutter MPs have joined forces to push for compulsory health warnings on sexually explicit DVDs and magazines.

The activists, who boast the support of federal Employment Minister Kevin Andrews, want cigarette-pack-style warning labels placed on DVDs and magazines containing R-rated sex scenes or images. This is sexually explicit material which might lead to sex-addiction and relationship problems, is one tag proposed by the Fatherhood Foundation, a conservative group opposed to porn and prostitution.

Asked about the foundation's proposal, a spokesman for Andrews said labelling R-rated material was certainly something worth looking at.

From News Today

The problem with censorship is that it is a question of being judgemental, something which can always be debated. Recently the Madras High Court ordered the revoking of the certification of actor-director S J Suryah's New released last year for alleged obscenity.

This has brought the spotlight on the Regional Censor Board in Chennai headed by Babu Rammasami who took charge of the post very recently.

In a chat with News Today, Rammasami shares his views on the controversy surrounding the Censor Board in the wake of the Suryah episode and also the moral responsibility of every film-maker in the industry.

Q: Do you think censorship is necessary for films today in a country like India?

A: Definitely. It is essential. We are a liberal country and there is freedom of expression for everyone as enshrined in the Constitution. Though majority of the film-makers are responsible, there are occasions when the sentiments of an individual or a group is hurt. In such cases, we the Censor Board have to act as watchdogs. In the name of creativity, one should churn out stuff that hurts the sentiments of others. In some western countries there is no censor board. There the trade bodies in the filmdom themselves act as watchdogs. They know their responsibility and act as a censor board themselves.

Q: In contrast to Tamil films, sex and violence are rampant in Hindi movies?

A: No doubt Bollywood churns out more number of high-budget movies with a liberal dose of sex and violence. However, those scenes are not imposed in the movie, rather it is part of the movie. In many Hindi movies, it comes as part of the movie, whereas here it is being imposed for commercial viability. Vulgarity is rampant even in comedy sequences here. There is lack of social etiquette. And, censorship has also got to take into the context and the cultural milieu.

Q: Don't you think small screen badly needs censorship?

A: Though a majority of television channels possess self-responsibility, a few certainly flout the rules. Only on such occasions one has to step in to put things in order. Though rule prevents screening of 'A' certificate films at prime time, several channels have screened them. We have taken note of such violations and lodged complaints with the authorities concerned.

Q: Comment on the recent controversy involving the Censor board and S J Suryah?

A: The issue is pending in court. We thought it was a novel story but gave a 'A' certification to it. However, the Madras High Court has ordered to revoke the certification. Meanwhile, the apex court has stayed the operation for now. Moreover compared to other regions, the awareness and feminist activism is very high here. They had staged protests against the movie. When he (Suryah) approached the board to add a sleazy number in the movie, we denied permission stating that it was obscene.

Q: What would you want to say to directors and producers?

A: Before making a film at a huge cost running to several crores, they should study guidelines issued by the Censor Board. If it is done then all troubles can be avoided. The Censor guidelines are available with all trade bodies and it should be made mandatory for the directors to study them. Ignorance is no way a bliss for film makers.

From AVN

Every battle is won in stages, and in every stage are dates that stand out as seminal moments in the tide of victory or defeat.  Oct. 3, 2005, may become a date that will live in infamy in the obscenity wars, because on that date a Louisiana jurist is expected to render a decision about the constitutionality of the state’s obscenity statute.

Until recently, no one outside this small Louisiana community considered it a hotbed of political controversy. That changed when the local district attorney charged two video-store owners with promoting obscenity.

The case, in which defense attorneys are challenging the very core of Louisiana’s applicable law, could have profound effects on obscenity laws nationwide.

Because it specifically attempts to regulate electronic communication, the law is … written so broadly that anything on the Net would be subject to Louisiana law, and Louisiana is not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, says Chicago First Amendment attorney J.D. Obenberger, one of the representatives for the defense. That’s a constitutional responsibility of the federal government. I’m using the improper effects of the statute on the Internet to get the whole statute thrown out.”

Judge Charles Porter is expected to announce his decision about the constitutional challenge Oct. 3. Whether he sides with the defense or the prosecution on the matter, all parties in the case, including the judge, agreed in advance that the case will be certified as a constitutionally important question of first impression, Obenberger says, and the decision will be appealed to the state Supreme Court or directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. Until a higher court has ruled on the constitutional issues, the obscenity prosecution will not proceed.

If the higher court sides with the defense, obscenity statutes in 45 other states will be in jeopardy due to similar construction. If we win in Louisiana, I don’t think anyone else is going to try [pressing an obscenity case] anywhere again, Obenberger says. If the Louisiana law falls, then all the other state laws fall like a house of cards.

In addition to challenging the vagueness and reach of the statute, Obenberger associate Reed Lee, who is acting as co-counsel, is challenging the law on the basis that it infringes individual privacy rights.

People do have the right to receive these materials in their homes, and a law such as this one, when it extends to consenting adults, goes beyond what’s constitutionally permissible, Obenberger says.

That argument may prove to be extremely compelling in this case, Obenberger notes. Lee submitted the same position in an amicus curae brief to the appellate court in the Extreme Associates case, and has since received an inquiry from the court asking if he will be available to present oral arguments to support his point when the court considers the matter.

Louisiana can’t control what everyone in the country gets to see and exert a heckler’s veto because someone in a community in your state may get offended by this. Everyone will get scared, and that will affect what goes on in [Los Angeles] and New York, Obenberger says. It’s going to chill free expression in Louisiana and that’s bad enough, but they’re going to chill free expression in areas of the country that maybe aren’t as conservative as this area of the country is.

From AVN

The high-stakes, dot-xxx sponsored Top-Level Domain (STLD) guessing game continues, as a conclusion regarding the contentious domain will not be reached until "a future date," a representative of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit international body that oversees the domain name system, said Friday.

ICANN’S board considered approving the proposed dot-xxx sTLD during a Thursday meeting as planned, but members expressed concerns in relation to draft compliance and process terms and opted to forgo any immediate action on the matter, the ICANN representative said.

Although ICANN has set no date for its next vote on dot-xxx, ICM president Stuart Lawley said he expects the board to consider the matter at its next regular meeting, scheduled for Oct. 18, and he firmly believes the domain will be approved at that time.

We’re quite pleased with [ICANN’s] decision, Lawley said. It wasn’t unexpected, especially since this is such a politically sensitive matter. They don’t want there to be any causes for embarrassment.

Lawley explained that in two previous instances, ICANN was left with “egg on its face” when the dot-travel and dot-pro sTLD approvals were met almost immediately with unforeseen, controversial developments. Within a week of ICANN’s approval of a contract with the registry for dot-travel, the registry was sold to another entity, and dot-pro proved to be a hotbed of “illegitimate” registration activity, Lawley noted.

Criticism of dot-xxx includes that anointing a special sTLD for the adult industry is inappropriate and would lead to an explosion of pornographic websites and that approval of dot-xxx would legitimize the adult entertainment industry. Ironically, it also includes that dot-xxx represents an attempt to “ghetto-ize” the adult industry, and that it would pave the way for governments and anti-porn groups to censor or even completely obliterate adult content from at least parts of the Web.

Of course, it may simply be that ICANN has delayed the vote again while it figures out how to extricate itself from what it may consider a no-win situation. If it approves dot-xxx, ICANN could face disapproval from social conservatives and governmental bodies that oppose the domain. Worse, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which retains veto power over the board’s actions, could reverse the decision. If ICANN denies dot-xxx, some may see the action as capitulating to those same forces. ICANN and the U.S. administration have faced sharp criticism recently because of close historical ties that won’t seem to break, despite repeated assurances from the U.S. that ICANN is independent and not subject to undue governmental influence.

Presumably the abusers, Paul Goggins & Cathy Jamieson, will be expecting the 5am police raid pretty soon then

From a Melon Farming reader

I was just considering the ramifications of this new repressive legislation, and the logic of turning innocent people into criminals:

I think politicians, civil servants and others in positions of authority, *who are found to have infringed our human rights*, should have to pay a penalty themselves, such as imprisonment, or a hefty fine for such a crime.

This would focus their minds on getting their legislation absolutely correct. It would also prove the strength of their convictions, in that they were prepared to pay a penalty if they got it wrong, they really must believe in it. I think that often they don't but it is politically expedient to impose the restrictions anyway.

Directors of companies have grave responsibilities to their employees to see that they are not abused. and kept safe Parents have similar responsibilities for their charges

But politicians and others who seem to want to act "in loco parentis" by imposing the kind of unfair censorship and restriction upon us, if we were children, can do so with impunity, and no penalties if they get it wrong.

Why should they be able to do this ?

Should the Human Rights Act be changed to hold them personally responsible ?

Saddam Hussein is now incarcerated because of the things he did to his people. No one thinks this is wrong. What our government is doing isn't anywhere as terrible as what Saddam did. But it is STILL repressive all the same, being only a matter of degree, and people WILL go to prison, just like braintree did. Shouldn't the people responsible for this be properly accountable, to see they get the law right to be sure such unfairness is avoided ?

I think putting other people in jail for no justified reason is enough to be a serious human rights abuse, and the people responsible should prove their case, or be locked up themselves.

From Joystiq

The BBFC has defended the inclusion of a hanging scene in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean even though a 12-year-old Welsh boy is thought to have died copying it. The film was passed suitable for 12-year-olds to watch on video or DVD by the BBFC.

The Western Mail told yesterday how Scott Buckle, of Swansea, was found hanging by the neck from a tie in his bedroom hours after watching the swashbuckling adventure on video.

Swansea and Gower Coroner Philip Rogers recorded an accidental death verdict on Scott who died in February 2004. Psychiatrist Dr John Talbot told the inquest Scott could have identified with the "anti-hero" of the film, Captain Jack Sparrow played by Johnny Depp.

He added the film contained "Hollywood type" scenes of hanging not "horrible scenes of hanging". He said these would not have been a deterrent to anyone likely to be influenced by the action on screen. The film showed Johnny Depp's character with a noose around his neck but finally escaping death after a rescue.

Scott's mother, senior social worker Fiona Buckle, said she was convinced Scott was trying to imitate the scene and may have thought he too could escape hanging.

Yesterday BBFC spokeswoman Laura Shelton said the board had cut hanging scenes from other movies. It was done if there was a suggestion hanging could be done with no consequence but she said the scene in Pirates of the Caribbean was brief and "unreal".

The BBFC issued this statement to the Western Mail yesterday, Pirates of the Caribbean was passed '12A' for cinema and '12' on video/DVD. The BBFC takes imitable techniques extremely seriously (more than all other countries), particularly where very young children are the target audience.

Where there is the suggestion that it's possible to hang for a period of time without consequences the BBFC will always intervene in children's films. The BBFC cut The Mummy (1999) to significantly shorten a scene of hanging and in The Abduction Club (2002) a similar cut was made before the film's release.

Pirates of the Caribbean did not contain images that suggested it was possible to hang by the neck without consequences. In addition, the brevity of the scene and fantasy nature of the whole film made it clear that the story was unreal.

From AVN

The high-stakes, dot-xxx sponsored Top-Level Domain (STLD) guessing game continues, as a conclusion regarding the contentious domain will not be reached until "a future date," a representative of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit international body that oversees the domain name system, said Friday.

ICANN’S board considered approving the proposed dot-xxx sTLD during a Thursday meeting as planned, but members expressed concerns in relation to draft compliance and process terms and opted to forgo any immediate action on the matter, the ICANN representative said.

Although ICANN has set no date for its next vote on dot-xxx, ICM president Stuart Lawley said he expects the board to consider the matter at its next regular meeting, scheduled for Oct. 18, and he firmly believes the domain will be approved at that time.

We’re quite pleased with [ICANN’s] decision, Lawley said. It wasn’t unexpected, especially since this is such a politically sensitive matter. They don’t want there to be any causes for embarrassment.

Lawley explained that in two previous instances, ICANN was left with “egg on its face” when the dot-travel and dot-pro sTLD approvals were met almost immediately with unforeseen, controversial developments. Within a week of ICANN’s approval of a contract with the registry for dot-travel, the registry was sold to another entity, and dot-pro proved to be a hotbed of “illegitimate” registration activity, Lawley noted.

Criticism of dot-xxx includes that anointing a special sTLD for the adult industry is inappropriate and would lead to an explosion of pornographic websites and that approval of dot-xxx would legitimize the adult entertainment industry. Ironically, it also includes that dot-xxx represents an attempt to “ghetto-ize” the adult industry, and that it would pave the way for governments and anti-porn groups to censor or even completely obliterate adult content from at least parts of the Web.

Of course, it may simply be that ICANN has delayed the vote again while it figures out how to extricate itself from what it may consider a no-win situation. If it approves dot-xxx, ICANN could face disapproval from social conservatives and governmental bodies that oppose the domain. Worse, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which retains veto power over the board’s actions, could reverse the decision. If ICANN denies dot-xxx, some may see the action as capitulating to those same forces. ICANN and the U.S. administration have faced sharp criticism recently because of close historical ties that won’t seem to break, despite repeated assurances from the U.S. that ICANN is independent and not subject to undue governmental influence.

updated
16th September

From email group www.smartgroups.com/groups/Backlash

Tonight's meeting at the Conway Hall was well attended, I thought, especially considering the transport problems caused by heavy rain and flooding. I know that Demred will report on the proceedings as soon as possible so I will just say that a fair number of organisations including Spanner Trust, Feminists Against Censorship, The Libertarian Alliance, Campaign Against Censorship, SM Dykes and SM Pride sent representatives who spoke to the meeting.

Individuals also spoke as the debate was widened. After a break, 'working parties' formed to discuss action on topics such as press activity, education, research etc and it was agreed that a further meeting should be arranged as soon as a suitable venue and date were found.

Further information on the proceedings of the meeting, future action and the time/place of the next meeting will be posted in the various online-forums and by email etc., to those who left their contact details with Demred and Ishmael who hosted and chaired the meeting.

A number of IC members were there so it was a pleasure to put some faces to names. Manniq won support for his proposal (discussed on a recent thread here) to organise an exhibition of images which would illustrate the problem inherent in the consultation documents descriptors; what exactly would be legally permissable to view and what would not under the proposed legislation.

Thanks and admiration to demred and all others who got this meeting and a fast-growing campaign up and running in a very short period of time. And my hopes of a successful outcome for all who believe in freedom of expression and in only well-considered, properly drawn legislation rather than knee-jerk, self-contradictory and vague nonsense.

Update 16th September

We were advised the proposals could be thrown out on procedural grounds.
We were advised that anonymous submissions to the consultation process will be recognised and valid.

We were told group submissions carry a lot of weight as well -- especially positive as we have support from melonfarmers, SM Pride, SM Bis, the Union of sex workers, Spanner, Ofwatch, SMDykes South East and London, Unfettered, the SFC, FAC, the Libertarian Alliance, the Campaign against Censorship and others.

SM pride also said they would work with their national network to arrange local meetings, which I think will be a relief for all of those of you that are fortunate to live out of the big smoke.

We also started to group into working groups. So far these are called education, lobbying, press and research.
we agreed to have another meeting in 10-14 days time in London.

From Eye Weekly

Despite all the happy Liberal talk of liberalization, the Ontario government will continue to view and screen every film, video, cartoon and video game in the province before they can be legally sold or seen by the public.

The new "Film Classification Act of 2005" came into effect on Aug. 31, and not only does the act not abandon film censorship in Ontario, as politicians said it would, it effectively expands it.

George Orwell would be impressed, says Toshiya Kuwabara, the outgoing manager of the tiny gay and lesbian Glad Day Bookstore, which fought in court to rein in the powers of the Ontario Film Review Board (OFRB). The Liberals are doing the opposite of what they say they are doing and are delighting as the public eats it up, he says.

In fact, the practice of screening and censoring films by the provincially run OFRB was declared unconstitutional and illegal by an Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling in early 2004. The court ordered the government to give up its authority to censor and ban films it didn't like within a year.

The McGuinty government did not appeal the decision and said they would comply. However, when the new legislation materialized late, it not only kept the powers of the province to screen and approve films, it expanded their authority further to include material previously not subject to prior approval by agents of the state.

The new act looks shockingly like the old act, says Noa Mendelsohn Aviv of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association's freedom of expression project. She says the constitution is supposed to be the supreme law of the land and the courts have said censorship is illegal under our constitution. If the government can simply ignore the courts and the constitution when they please, what does that say for their respect for the rule of law in this country?

OFRB spokesperson Jason Okamura sees it differently. When asked to respond to the concerns of critics, Okamura simply read the same prepared statement he read to this reporter in the spring when the legislation was introduced as a draft. The Act, he said, "responds" to the court ruling by "narrowing" the focus of censorship.

Alan Borovoy, lawyer for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has called this interpretation of the court's direction peculiar, saying: The court didn't say to narrow censorship, it said to abandon it.

Freedom of expression advocates say the fight isn't over yet. John Tatulis, the owner of VXI Multimedia and a member of the group Responsible Ontario Adult Retailers (ROAR) says his group will continue its fight to keep the province out of their stores. One of our members just won a court decision giving him the right to sue the government as well as specific government employees for the damages they have caused to his business in their attempts to shut him down through censorship and seizures.

He realizes they are fighting an uphill battle. But we're not giving up -- we will hold them accountable, he says.

From AVN

In an attempt to exert control over the sexual practices of American citizens under the guise of protecting children, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) introduced bill H.R. 3726 this week, also called The Child Pornography Protection Act of 2005.

Among other provisions, the bill targets adult citizens who record visual images of consensual sexual activity in the privacy of their own homes, adds nudity and clothed images of pubic areas to the definition of “explicit sexual activity” as defined in U.S.C. 18 §2256, and criminalizes the production and distribution of R-rated mainstream motion pictures that fail to comply with the record creation and notice provisions of 2257, and possibly for violation of obscenity laws.

The stated intent of H.R. 3726 is to crack down on what Pence refers to as “home pornographers,” defined as people who create child pornography using their home computers. A close reading of the bill, however, reveals far more ambitious legislative objectives, including altering the federal labeling and record keeping law (U.S.C. 18 §2257) to include simulated, written and illustrated content, which directly implicates many if not most Hollywood films, expanding the reach of federal forfeiture laws to include 2257 violations and obscenity convictions, and enhancing administrative subpoena power to cover obscenity cases, making it easier for the government to compel a person to appearance or to obtain records in a legal proceeding without having to demonstrate probable cause before a judge.

Hold on a bit...an awful lot of the European Channels are marketed across Europe and are simply not aimed at a single territory. Britain has its own channels simply because it has its own repressive standards and cannot share in the infinitely better services viewed by the rest of Europe. I think Beyer may find that Europeans have the choice of many more adult channels than the Sky suffering Brits.

From the Daily Mail

27 X-rated channels make Britain shameful adult TV capital of Europe

Britain has become the television porn capital of Europe – with five times more adult only channels than anywhere else in the continent. UK viewers can now tune in to 27 dedicated porn channels, compared to just five in Germany – our nearest rival.

Research shows pornography was the fastest growing genre in television last year. The number of X-rated channels in Britain increased by a third – from 18 to 27 – to overtake the availability of children’s channels, which number 24.

Campaigners last night blamed the Government and regulators for allowing porn to ‘flood’ our screens. John Beyer, director of mediawatch-uk said X-rated broadcasters are endlessly ‘testing the waters’. He added: ‘Some things they put on are in breach of generally accepted standards. But the failure of the Obscene Publications Act means pornographers know they can get away with pushing the boundaries and showing harder and harder material. The porn industry has moved into TV in a big way – but with only minimal regulatory constraint.’

The research, by the media consultancy Screen Digest, shows there are now 84 pornography channels across Europe, compared to just three a decade ago. Under Ofcom rules, pornography in Britain is far less explicit than in much of continental Europe. But broadcasters are lobbying to lift the current ban on R18 films and earlier this year Playboy TV was fined £25,000 by Ofcom for screening hard-core pornographic film in breach of the programme code.

Surely games can be sold such that allow for unlimited modification via Internet download. There must surely be a recognition that when modified via the Internet the original rating may change. All it needs is a little advice on the download page.

From The Register

US games software watchdog the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has told games publishers they must reveal any hidden content included in all the software they have released since 1 September 2004.

The order was sent by email, a copy of which was leaked to games-oriented website Gamasutra this week. In the email, the ESRB expressed its concern that hidden content subsequently exposed by games modifications could undermine the ratings system. Since the ESRB is run by the games industry itself, it undoubtedly fears that any loss of faith in its ratings could lead to a potentially harsher, government-mandated certification system.

To counter that threat, the ESRB told all publishers and developers they must formally detail any hidden material which the organisation has not already been notified about. If you fail to notify us of previously undisclosed, non-playable, pertinent content by 9 January 2006, and such content becomes playable through a subsequent authorised or unauthorised release of code to unlock it, rendering the original rating assignment inaccurate, punitive in addition to corrective actions may result, the watchdog warned, without going into details.

Any hidden material reported to the ESRB by that time will be used to consider whether a game should be re-rated. In future, the organisation said, if games companies don't want hidden content to be reflected in a game's rating, they shouldn't include it. The request follows the discovery of adult material in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas earlier this year.

The ESRB's rules have always required games publishers to notify it of hidden content intended to be exposed by special codes or, say, by sending game characters to certain locations. These so-called Easter Eggs are commonplace, but since the adult content in GTA: San Andreas was not included as an Easter Egg, it was not revealed to the ESRB.

GTA: San Andreas is due to return to shops this week after its publisher, Take-Two Interactive, removed the so-called 'Hot Coffee' content in order to get the rating back down to Mature.

Shameful comments. It is beyond ludicrous to suggest that there is a parallel with the treatment of Jews. He should be fed to the lions!

From The Scotsman, Thanks to Dan

A row has broken out after a minister compared the performance of scenes in a controversial musical to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Reverend Bruce Gardner made the comments in an e-mail to theatre bosses in Aberdeen after learning that Jerry Springer - The Opera will be shown at the city's His Majesty's Theatre next year.

His comments were described as "inappropriate" by the theatre's chief executive.

Gardner is opposed to particular scenes in the musical where God and Jesus Christ appear as guests on the Jerry Springer show. He claims this is an attack on the Christian community, who, he says, are being "singled out" in the same way as Jews were in Nazi Germany, and is calling for the scenes to be removed.

Gardner's e-mail to Aberdeen Performing Arts, which manages the theatre, reads: It is disgraceful that a demonstration of contempt for things regarded as holy by many is being defended on the grounds that 'free speech' will be denied unless one section of the population is allowed to be attacked.

While not wishing to exaggerate unduly, this is how the Jews were singled out in Nazi Germany, first for
ridicule, then contempt, then persecution.

Careless signals sent out by leaders can lead to less sophisticated manifestations of disrespect towards ethnic and faith groups in the community.

Defending his comments, Gardner, who is a minister at Banchory-Devenick in Aberdeenshire, said: Here you have a show which includes something which is gratuitously blasphemous and offensive to Christians. The point I was trying to make was that the treating of people with disrespect in Nazi Germany began with the ridiculing of Jews."

Duncan Hendry, chief executive of His Majesty's Theatre, said: "This is an extreme over-reaction by Rev Gardner. I don't think Jerry Springer - The Opera is a comment on Christianity any more than Roy of the Rovers is a comment on football. His comments about the Jews in Nazi Germany are particularly inappropriate.

When asking the Brits to go along with Clarke's schedule to dismantle our rights it would be nice to think there is tolerance and freedom left worth defending. The Government certainly don't seem to be doing much to help people enjoy life. They seem to be devoting 100% of their time to ensuring that the authorities can lock people up on a whim. 

From The Register

A concerned Register reader from Norwich has got in touch with some disturbing news from the constituency of liberty-eating Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

Despite Clarke's best efforts a fetish club is shortly to open in the East Anglian town. The Trample Fetish Club offers the citizens of Norwich, and beyond, the chance to be trodden on, sat upon or given a general beating by a variety of lovely hostesses. The local council granted planning permission despite objections from Clarke, the local MP, and 31 other people.

The club, due to open soon, has a Trample room, a Crush room and a Smoothing room - that's having a lady sit on your face for those not up to speed with Norfolk's sexual mores. The Trample Scene website claims, probably correctly, to be The only Trample Fetish Club in a 100 mile radius of Norwich.

The final part of the club is the dungeon which sounds more like somewhere Clarke would like to send terrorist suspects for interrogation than a fun night out: The website promises: Not for the fainthearted'!! - Our hostesses will whip you, kick you, stamp on you, punch you, walk all over you, chain you up and humiliate you. Will you survive our dungeon experience!!

Roy Singfield, the owner of the club, told the Reg: We'll be opening on the 26th, with a bit of luck - the boys are still working hard to get it ready. He said around 150 people have already applied for membership.

Many thanks to Register reader Jason Dagless who tipped us off. He said: All the current hooha from Mr Clarke and his ideas for reducing our freedoms to stop terrorism. Well he is my local MP and recently a business man has asked to set up a "Fetish Trample Club" in the street opposite where I live (Prince of Wales Rd, Norwich). Many residents objected and even Clarke apparently made his objections most clear. However, the local council ignored him and the club is to go ahead.

Thanks to nasty minded people at the Home Office a horror film depicting grievous bodily harm in a hardcore sex film will set up UK viewers for 3 years in jail.

Limey customs are going to love this. They will be able to sift through people's innocently bought porn DVDs looking for one that will get people put away for years. Welcome to Britain!

Thanks to Shaun

A Wicked Pictures’ latest Jonathan Morgan-directed comedy, Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre, will hit porn stores everywhere on September 16 with a fully loaded, three-disc package that pays homage to the same thing that the release itself does — horror movies from the '80’s to the present.

Morgan told AVN.com of writing the script with Wicked contract performer/director Stormy Daniels and Space Nuts co-writer August Warwick. What we did is very similar to what the Wayan brothers did with the Scary Movie series. We took all these little famous parts from all of these horror movies blended it with comedy and wrapped it with great sex.

From Reuters

Make Poverty History (MPH), hailed as one of the most effective lobbying campaigns ever with its simple message and signature white wrist band, was banned on Monday from television and radio advertising in Britain.

Ofcom said the goals of its campaign, including an array of stars clicking their fingers to ram home the message that a child dies of preventable poverty every three seconds, were political and therefore outlawed. We have reached the unavoidable conclusion that MPH is a body whose objects are 'wholly or mainly' political as defined under the Act. MPH is therefore prohibited from advertising on television or radio, Ofcom said on its Web site.

When Ofcom stops ignoring complaints about brief snippets of hardcore on UK satellite channels, I wonder if they will argue that the snippets of hardcore are brief and wont be spotted by viewers so can be ignored

From Ofcom complaints bulletin

Cruising on Channel five, 4 June 2005, 23:20

This 1980 film starred Al Pacino as an undercover cop investigating a serial killer on the New York gay scene. A viewer complained about two virtually imperceptible clips of anal penetration. He believed that the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) had required these scenes to be cut for the film to obtain an 18-rating.

Response

Five explained that this version had been transmitted in error. The scenes were so brief that they were imperceptible without freeze-framing and they had not been picked up when the film was received from the distributor. The broadcaster was aware that the BBFC had required edits but, on checking at normal viewing speed, these scenes had not been visible and it had been assumed that this was the edited version.

The broadcaster assured us that it would now be alert to the possibility that very brief cuts required by the BBFC should be checked thoroughly. Five was also looking at any other precautions that might reasonably be taken to prevent similar mistakes occurring in future.

Decision

Given the extreme brevity of the pictures, very few viewers would have been aware of these scenes if they had not watched the film using a frame-advance mechanism. However the Programme Code does advise broadcasters to use the BBFC video classifications as a guide when transmitting films. In this case, an unintentional error was made. Taking into account the broadcaster’s actions, we consider that appropriate steps have been taken to avoid any similar occurrence.

Complaint resolved

Thanks to Shaun

A couple of animated whimsies targeting the rights abusers at the Home Office:

http://eclectech.co.uk/swizz.php

http://eclectech.co.uk/clarkeidcards.php

From The Telegraph

India's leading female tennis player has been subjected to a fatwa by a Muslim cleric for wearing short skirts and revealing tops on the international tennis circuit.

Sania Mirza, 18, who became the first Indian woman to reach the fourth round of a Grand Slam at the US Open last week, is hugely popular in India.

The fatwa - in effect, a demand that she cover up - was issued by a senior cleric of the Sunni Ulema Board, a little-known group. Similar fatwas have been issued against Mirza, who comes from a devout Muslim family, but none has ever gained popular support among India's 130 million Muslims.

The dress she wears on the tennis courts…leaves nothing to the imagination, Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui told The Hindustan Times. She will undoubtedly be a corrupting influence.

He said she should follow the example of Iranian women who wore long tunics and headscarves to play in the Asian Badminton Championships.

From News.com.au

Yahoo Inc defended itself today against accusations that it supplied data to Chinese authorities which led to the imprisonment of a journalist, saying it had to abide by local laws.

Press watchdogs accused Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd of providing details about email communications that helped identify, and were used as evidence against, Shi Tao, who was sentenced in April to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets abroad.

Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based, Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said in a statement emailed to Reuters by the company's Hong Kong arm. Yahoo would not confirm or deny that it furnished the Chinese Government with the information.

The French group Reporters Without Borders said Shi, a former news editor for the Contemporary Business News in Hunan province, was convicted for emailing foreign-based websites the text of an internal message to journalists about dangers around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 2004.

China broadly defines as a state secret anything that affects the security and interests of the state, but the limits are vague and can include political news.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in February that China had the most journalists in prison, 42, of any country for the sixth year in a row. Among those in detention are New York Times researcher Zhao Yan, arrested on charges of leaking state secrets to foreigners, and Hong Kong-based reporter Ching Cheong of the Singapore Straits Times, whom China suspects of spying for Taiwan.

Shi's conviction sent shockwaves through the Chinese journalist community because many felt his sentence was excessive and might have been heavy to serve as a warning.

The Committee to Protect Journalists decried what it called China's "chokehold" on the internet. We categorically condemn the outrageous prosecution of Shi Tao," executive director Ann Cooper said. We call on the Chinese Government and Yahoo to provide a full explanation of the circumstances that led the company to provide account holder information.

From The New Nation

Some 23 judges of the Judicial Service yesterday visited the Bangladesh Film Censor Board and exchanged views with the members of the Board.

The Judicial officials discussed with the Censor Board members about the activities of the Board, the existing cases filed against the Body, confiscation of films, giving of Censor certificate and its cancellation and Board's initiatives to prevent vulgarity in films.

Chairman of the Bangladesh Film Censor Board and Information Secretary Dr Muhammad Mahbubur Rahman said, All the citizens have some responsibilities to promote healthy cultural activities with a view to sustain the tradition and heritage of the nation.

The Chairman urged all to discharge their own duties from their individual positions to remove vulgarity from the films to save the young generation from moral degradation.

From Scoop

Publisher Steve Crow (best known for his popular Erotica Adult Lifestyle Expos) and editor Jonathan Eisen  have teamed up to create New Zealand's newest magazine UNCENSORED.

I think New Zealanders are beginning to realise that much of the information that they get from the mainstream comes with an 'agenda' that involves staying away from or 'spinning' the big issues rather than risk rocking the boat. UNCENSORED is simply about presenting the facts exactly as they are, exposing the naked truth and 'outing' those who seek to corrupt or hide it from us for their own purposes."

Despite Steve Crow's reputation as the founder of Vixen (New Zealand's most successful importer, distributor and producer of adult entertainment products) UNCENSORED magazine will not be publishing porn. Rather, Crow promises readers just the facts, for a change free from contamination by advertising pressures, vested interests and industry or government-sponsored PR spin.

Crow, who will be writing a regular column in UNCENSORED, has had many run-ins with "Wellington bureaucrats" and politicians, and has often taken them to court over censorship issues, winning many of his cases. He points out what he calls the "absurdity" of NZ censorship laws in which he says there is too much subjectivity, Victorian attitudes and double standards.

As an example of the double standards, he cites the fact that hardcore homosexual porn is OK with our censors, while hardcore heterosexual porn apparently is not. He states that perhaps this is a direct reflection of the personal attitudes of the Chief and Deputy Chief Censors, both of whom are gay.

Another double standard, Crow says, is that the Censors are far more tolerant of violence, rape and murder, often with a little bit of (non-explicit) sex thrown in for good measure, than they are of explicit sex, especially if there is even the slightest hint of coercion or violence. It seems to be acceptable to our Censors to flood us with media depicting violence, no matter how extreme as long as, God forbid, we don’t show people having sex.

After the idea of outlawing "hate speech" arose last year, Crow decided that the issue of censorship went much farther than the restrictions imposed on adult entertainment; and UNCENSORED, his latest project, reflects his concerns that many forms of censorship in New Zealand are widespread.

It's no accident that September 11 is the date chosen for the launch of UNCENSORED as the hidden facts regarding the real perpetrators of the tragedy of 9/11 are featured in the first issue of the magazine.

UNCENSORED magazine is distributed by Independent Media Distributors Ltd and will be available in booksellers, news dealers and supermarkets throughout the country. It will initially be published quarterly. RRP $9.95 (126 pages, full colour, perfect bound.)

I wonder if the Government's nasty proposals are somehow linked to some sort of international agreement. It will be interesting to see if other countries come up with similar suggestions.

Perhaps we should also think about providing information about disc encryption tools and how to use proper software to remove all traces from caches etc.

Based on an article from The Guardian

Last week, the Home Office and Scottish Executive proposed changing this, making possession punishable by up to three years in prison.

In a foreword to the public consultation, which is open until December 2, Home Office minister Paul Goggins and Scottish Executive justice minister Cathy Jamieson say that these offences will mirror the arrangements already in place in respect of child pornography. The intention is to reduce the demand for such material and to send a clear message that it has no place in our society.

But would such legislation achieve much beyond sending a message? The consultation notes: We are not aware of any western jurisdiction which prohibits simple possession of extreme material.

By contrast, possession of indecent images of children is illegal in numerous countries, enabling international co-operation. The UK's largest investigation of online paedophile activity, Operation Ore, relied on the US Federal Bureau of Investigations collecting around 250,000 credit cards numbers used to pay for access to a US child pornography web-site, and passing on more than 7,000 from the UK. [Of which many were payment to adult porn sites. The police lied in court about this technicality and innocent people were persecuted]

Formal structures are being created for such cooperation, such as the Virtual Global Taskforce, which includes the UK's National Crime Squad, police agencies in Australia, Canada and the US and Interpol. In December 2003 the taskforce launched Operation PIN, setting up fake child abuse web-sites. These captured the details of a number of individuals when they attempted to download an image, then told them that they had committed an offence and their data would be passed to the relevant national authority. It is usually possible to trace web users through data recorded by a web server.

A National Crime Squad spokesperson says that no prosecutions followed this data collection, but adds that the priority was crime reduction. The taskforce is also planning a 24-hour-a-day online policing presence, with officers from the four member countries involved in online patrols such as overt visits to chatrooms. This will be discussed at a meeting between the member agencies in Canberra next week.

In June, the G8 club of rich countries agreed to help Interpol to establish a £2 million system linking countries' databases of such images, and later this month the UK will hand an implementation study on this to Interpol. The UK's national database, Childbase, contains 800,000 images, allowing swifter identification of victims using facial recognition.

Such international cooperation would help in investigating extreme pornography, as all the publishers appear to be outside the UK. The Internet Watch Foundation says that 60% of the 140 adult pornographic sites it checked in the first six months of this year which appeared to contravene the Obscene Publications Act appeared to be US-based, with 14% in China and 4% in Russia. None was British.

In an emailed response, an FBI spokesperson says cooperation similar to Operation Ore would be possible for extreme pornography, adding: It is not an easy answer though. In the US we have obscenity laws that make it a violation to post lewd material online. How that is defined and enforced is reviewed on a case-by-case basis, by enforcement agencies and government prosecutors.

Policing this, from a single country point of view, is going to be a nightmare, predicts Tony Dearsley, senior computer investigations manager at UK computer forensics firm Vogon International. How do you get to these people? Like most cross-border issues, unless you have got an agreement or an identical offence, it will be very unlikely to get a warrant to get information or shut [a site] down. He adds that extreme pornography is often free to access, without requiring the credit card payments which enabled the discredited Operation Ore.

Dearsley says that Vogon has seen such material on computers belonging to suspects in rape and murder cases: hard drives often retain traces of all files they have stored, despite attempts to erase and overwrite them.

This could represent an alternative way to investigate the proposed crime. A Home Office spokesperson says that data on a suspect's computer often gives clues to others, adding that employers, internet service providers, credit card providers and the public would also be likely to provide leads.

But David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England, says that technological change is likely to make policing possession of extreme pornography very difficult. His research with paedophiles found that, after Operation Ore, they switched to peer-to-peer networks and net-enabled mobile telephones. Usually, the law's a step behind, says Professor Wilson. You have to look at why society produces these people in the first place.

This is getting ludicrous. The Internet is being blamed simply for providing a mechanism for like minded people to talk about a shared interest and to pass on relevant knowledge. If I was considering suicide I for one would appreciate practical suggestions on a good way to depart.

Instead of simply wanting to imprison, punish, ban etc why not consider the more positive option of adding a Samaritans presence to such websites and forums. I am sure that this would do a lot more good than criminalising, fining and imprisoning.

From an editorial  on Yorkshire Today

Why we say internet law must change

Very few occurrences in life are more harrowing than a parent having to cope with the death of a child. No words can ease their pain. Elizabeth Taylor's daughter Carina Stephenson, by all accounts a vivacious 17-year-old, was found hanging in woods in South Yorkshire in May. Her family's grief is exacerbated by the belief that Carina would still be alive if she had not logged onto sickening internet websites which give advice and practical instruction about suicide.

Worse still, this appears not to be an isolated case. Earlier this year, two girls in South Wales arranged a suicide pact after becoming friends via an internet chat room. And Carina, herself, is known to have exchanged emails with three other people said to have been contemplating suicide. One of this group has yet to be traced.

It is paramount that the Government heeds a plea from Ms Taylor and investigates how the internet can be better monitored and, if necessary, brings in legislation to enable it to shut down specific sites.

The Home Office needs to work closely with its global counterparts to establish whether a way can be found to remove websites which advocate suicide.

The Government must also look to the response of Japan, where action was taken following a series of internet-related suicides. Service providers in the country have a legal obligation to inform the police of any email traffic involving computer users discussing the possibility of taking their own lives.

It is a common-sense measure which Ministers should be able to replicate in Britain. Ms Taylor has looked at the suicide sites that her daughter had viewed. She was physically sickened by the depravity of the images that she witnessed, and the nature of the information provided.

If the Government examines those sites, it will know how urgent action is needed before more young lives, like Carina's, are lost so tragically and so needlessly.

Letter to Ofwatch (No such letter received by the Melon Farmers though!)

Your website reports that the Scottish Executive and the Home Office are currently consulting the public about whether the possession of extreme pornographic material should be illegal.  We would like to make sure that everyone who has an interest in this consultation knows about it and is able to send us their views and I am glad that you have been able to publicise it. 

In addition to the PDF version of the consultation, there is an html version and online response form available online which some people may find easier to use: www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/08/30112423/24254.  I have also attached a word version of the response form.

Both we and the Home Office can also provide paper copies of the consultation document and copies in other formats such as large font or audio if anyone would prefer – we can be contacted at

Consultation on Possession of Extreme Pornography
Criminal Law Policy Unit
2nd Floor, Fry Building
2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF 

Tel: 020 7035 6981
Fax: 0870 336 9141
Email: CLPUconsultations@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

Extreme Pornography Consultation
Criminal Justice Division
Scottish Executive
1WR  St Andrew’s House
Regent’s Road
Edinburgh   EH1 3DG

Tel: 0131 244 3348
Fax: 0131 244 2623
Email : extremepornography@scotland.gsi.gov.uk

The Home Office will publish a summary of the responses received within 3 months of the closing date of the consultation (2 December), which will be available on their website. 

The Scottish Executive will make all responses available to the public in the Scottish Executive library and on the Scottish Executive consultation web pages by 6 January 2006 unless confidentiality is requested in the Respondent Information Form.  All responses not marked confidential will be checked for any potentially defamatory remarks before being lodged in the library or placed on the website.  Anyone can make arrangements to view responses by contacting the Scottish Executive library on 0131 244 4552.  Responses can be copied and posted but a charge may be made for this service.

I hope that you find this information useful and I would be pleased to answer any queries that you have.

Yours faithfully

Susie Gledhill
Criminal Justice Division
Scottish Executive
St Andrew's House
Regent’s Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG

More evidence that the state persecutors cannot be trusted to maintain just proprtionality. Most likely down to intolerant nutters getting involved in the process.

From the BBC

Naked rambler Stephen Gough has been jailed for two weeks after being found guilty of a breach of the peace while walking in Midlothian.

The 46-year-old, from Bournemouth, was naked in the dock as he was sentenced at Edinburgh Sheriff Court. He was convicted of exposing himself, causing fear and alarm and distracting drivers on the A701 on 1 September.

Gough, who is walking from Land's End to John O'Groats in the nude, had denied the charge. He argued that walking naked in public did not constitute a breach of the peace.

But Sheriff Kenneth MacIver told him: I have no doubt in my mind that walking naked through a Scottish town and along a busy road is not something which the Scottish public should be expected to deal with. He said people were likely to be "upset, alarmed or offended" by his behaviour.

Gough, who was arrested near Bilston, said he would continue with his walk when he was released from prison.

At a previous hearing his female companion, 34-year-old Melanie Roberts from Bournemouth, admitted a reduced breach of the peace charge. Sentence was deferred on the hairdresser, who wore a T-shirt and jeans in the dock.

During Gough's trial, 21-year-old postman William Lister said he had been "pretty alarmed and shocked" when he saw the couple walking naked apart from their socks and boots. One police officer told the court that the couple's actions had been "totally inappropriate". Another said that he found nudity "distasteful".

From Korea Herald

Sex and Lucia, a Spanish film directed by Julio Medem, which was released in Korea last Friday, is full of sexual description. In the sexually explicit movie, a naked man and woman embrace each other and immerse in the sea in their seductive encounter ensued by consecutive scenes of sex.

Moreover, the man's genitals are briefly shown through close-up shots. Despite such scenes, the movie does not seem offending because it, as a whole, depicts a winding, nostalgic journey of a Madrid waitress Lucia (Paz Vega) to reconcile unresolved feelings on the sudden death of her boyfriend.

In the United States, the original uncut version of this film has been initially rated as NC-17. With some modification, the rating has later been eased to R. The Korea Media Rating Board (KMRB) was as lenient as its U.S. counterpart in rating the movie, allowing viewers aged 18 and above to see its uncut version.

It's amazing to watch a movie like this here in Korea without any cut or modification. I couldn't imagine this a couple of years ago. I still remember social jitters raised by Lies by Jang Seon-woo and Too young to die by Park Jin-pyo, said Choi Hyun-sik, who watched  Sex and Lucia on its release.

The "lenient rating" of the movie appears to reflect the recent easing of the KMRB's guidelines for rating films.

When Intimacy, a French film directed by Patrice Chereau, was imported in 2003, it had been prohibited from being shown until some obscene cuts were completely modified, though the film was not as strong as Sex and Lucia. Even last year when Drowning by Numbers, a British movie directed by Peter Greenaway, was opened after sensitive parts of actors' body had been obscured with mosaic, the situation was not so different.

In June, however, The Mother, a British movie directed by Roger Michell which cinematized sexual relations between an old woman in her late 60s and a 40-something man, was allowed to be released with no-cut, no-modification. The movie has clearly shown a sketch drawn by the old heroine, in which sexual intercourse is described. Since the decision, Innocents - The dreamers by Bernardo Bertolucci, L'Ennui by Cedric Kahn and Eros by Michelangelo Antonioni have also been released in sequence in its uncut version.

The KMRB, established to assure the ethics and public spirit of the films, phonogram, video products and so forth, has reviewed both domestic and foreign films, and made recommendations for importing foreign films. While the organization has examined materials containing excessively violent or indecent description that is harmful to public morals, and that may derange the social order, it has been perceived as an outdated censoring organization due to its strict ratings and subsequent measures, and thus considered as a big brother of regulation for a long time.

Now, the Board is taking a step forward to set a new guideline for the two clashing values it pursues to be reconciled: social order and freedom of expression. As Lee points out, these two must exist jointly in harmony. In consideration of the fact that the classification of age rating is a system protecting our youth from harmful media, I think further discussion is required for the strict ratings on media targeted at youth. However, for adults, I would like to support the development of our media industry by guaranteeing full freedom of expression to people who openly and deliberately manufacture those media. I will do my best to protect our youth while still fully guaranteeing freedom of expression. For this, we will review it carefully and improve it towards a desirable direction.

It appears that the nutters are in disarray about their support of this nasty law. Some clearly want to take the opportunity of having millions of people imprisoned for viewing all types of pornography. I sometimes cannot believe just how nasty those on the moral high ground can get.

In the meantime I would really like to know how the shits from the misleadingly named Care can so whole heartedly support the proposals to imprison those watching mere depiction of non-consensual sex such as spanking movies and the like. No doubt they are sure that the entire religious community are above suspicion. Well let me tell you that you are wrong. Even religious families will be ruined by this legislation

From The Church of England Newspaper

A leading Christian watchdog has attacked the government’s new plans to crackdown on obscene pornographic and sexually violent images on the internet, insisting that the current proposals are worse than no law at all. They warned that it would not prevent further porn-inspired attacks on women. Mediawatch-uk said that the government had “missed a marvellous opportunity,” and the new laws represented a “fudged approach” to the problem.

Dave Turtle, a Mediawatch-uk spokesman, responded angrily to the new proposals, protesting that a law which is badly put together is worse than no law at all. All other forms of pornographic material are currently subject to the Obscene Publications Act 1959, but the internet is not covered. A new offence proposed by the Home Office last week would make it illegal to possess violent and abusive pornography and would criminalise anyone who downloads such images through the internet or on a mobile phone.

The new offence could be punishable by up to three years in prison. However, Mediawatch-uk said it feared the proposed legislation would not deter addicts, and that the legislation was uneven and easy to circumvent. Mr Turtle added: Why decompartmentalise some hardcore porn websites from others? It is an illogical approach to the problem.

Referring to the murder of Jane Longhurst, who was killed by an internet porn addict two years ago, Mr Turtle said the new laws won’t prevent further attacks on individuals. John Beyer, the director of Mediawatch-uk said that the measures proposed would not satisfy the dismay and unease felt by many “good” people who “object to the imposition of pornographic material and the sexualised culture everywhere in the media”.

Elsewhere, however, there was unequivocal support for the new ban. Christian social care charity CARE said that they “applauded” the Government’s new attempts to regulate internet pornography. Roger Smith, the head of public policy for the charity, commented: This is the first time the Government has taken a moral stance on this issue of adult sexual behaviour, and they are deciding that it is unacceptable. Previously, there have only been statements on child pornography, and they have taken a laissez-faire attitude on other violent pornography. This is a big step forward, and we should encourage them.

From The Toronto Sun

As a protest against the U.S. film rating system, Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies may be released "unrated" in America despite the risk of being banned in many theatre chains, producer Robert Lantos said yesterday.  It makes a statement that we are bailing out of the whole ratings system, as opposed to accepting this punitive rating, a bitter Lantos told the Sun from his Toronto office.

That decision came after Egoyan lost an appeal in Los Angeles of an NC-17 rating on his dramatic murder mystery by the MPAA The rating was imposed in August for the film's graphic sexuality, especially in scenes involving co-stars Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth and Rachel Blanchard. The same film, uncut, will be screened at the Toronto filmfest as a Gala on Tuesday.

It's absurd, Lantos said. People should be able to make their own decisions. It's not like it's compulsory viewing. No one has to go. We're talking about making it available. That's it.

An NC-17 rating dooms a film to a commercial purgatory in the U.S. because many theatres refuse to show it and many media outlets refuse to advertise it. The same thing may happen with an "unrated" film, but Lantos said he and ThinkFilm, the distributor, want to make their protest statement.

The bitter irony of the appeal process is that Egoyan, after trimming a few seconds out of several scenes, actually won the vote -- six to four -- but a two-thirds majority is required to overturn an earlier decision on appeal. So we are stuck with the NC-17, Lantos said. This is the end of the road with the MPAA.

The trims Egoyan had made will now be restored, Lantos said. They gave us a long litany of 'offensive' material. We reluctantly took out some things we thought we could live without -- a few seconds here and a few seconds there -- but that wasn't enough. So we'll put everything back in. The upside is that we'll just go out with the original film.

Lantos said U.S. censorship seems to mirror the political climate of the current administration and he considers it repressive. It is also perverse because you can brutally rape and torture and murder (in a movie) and not get an NC-17. That is the troubling part. It is amazing the difference today between the U.S. and Canada, and it wasn't always thus. In fact, we used to be more conservative 25 years ago. Boy, has the pendulum swung.

Thanks to Dennis

How about encouraging Melon farmer members and other horrified citizens to contact Mr Alvaro Gil-Robles the European Commissioner for Human Rights requesting that he investigate previous human rights abuses such as internment of so called "terror suspects" without trial and of cause this current abuse. And perhaps encourage him to "over see" the home office in all future legislation making.

commissioner.humanrights@coe.int

www.coe.int/T/E/Commissioner_H.R/Communication_Unit/Commissioner/Homepage/index.asp#TopOfPage

From the Melon Farmers

How about organising a petition, not just to oppose the proposal, but to show a long term resistance to the authorities. ie something along the lines:

We the udersigned oppose the Home Office proposal to criminalise the possession of consensual or adult pornography (including the staged depiction of non consensual sex). Furthermore we agree to never return a guilty verdict in any crime involving consensual adult sex nor to assist the authorities in prosecuting such crimes.

From The Register

The European Commission should be cautious about extending the Television Without Frontiers Directive (TVWF Directive) to cover the provision of online audiovisual content services, according to trade group the E-Business Regulatory Alliance.

The group made its comments in response to a consultation by the European Commission on whether the provision of audiovisual content services – by television broadcast, broadband or 3G – needs a new legal regime.

The Commission believes that telecom providers will soon be able to deliver broadcasting services in a quality equal to traditional TV, while traditional content providers will enter the communications markets. It therefore wants to make sure now that the new regime has better competition and consumer choice together with protection for children and cultural diversity.

Comments on the proposals were invited by 5 September, in time for a forthcoming EU audiovisual content conference to be held in Liverpool later this month.

According to the E-Business Regulatory Alliance, the existing framework governing audiovisual and information society services is working well. It is not convinced that any change is necessary.

“The internet is not a virtual 'Wild West', but is already heavily regulated with several instruments, for example the e-Commerce Directive and the Copyright Directive. Member States also have horizontal laws that can be generally applied to the internet,” says the Alliance.

“Where public policy issues, for example the protection of minors and human dignity, are important to the online environment, national legislation or industry self regulation is already adequate. The online business sector has done much to protect children and minors by introducing, for example, parental/guardian controls and age verification,” it adds.

The Alliance calls on the Commission to conduct a Regulatory Impact Assessment – along the lines of the UK’s model – in each business sector likely to be affected by any new regulations.

It is also concerned that simply extending the Directive will not solve the problem, in that businesses are unable to predict what developments will take place, and therefore what laws will be needed in the future. Nor does the Alliance believe that the timescale set for publishing the draft Directive – the end of this year – is workable, especially given the need for proper Regulatory Impact Assessments.

It calls for a light touch in respect of any proposals for regulating the internet, and questions whether the proposals will provide for legal certainty. It calls on the Commission to ensure high levels of subsidiarity and to maintain a strong country of origin approach – so that businesses are not subject to different rules if offering services in different Member States, but merely have to satisfy those in their country of origin.

From YouGov
Spotted by MediawatchWatch

YouGov were one of the sponsors of the Edinburgh festival and they carried out several TV-related polls, the most interesting of which were:

I Predict a Riot:

Jerry Springer (Popetown, Spooks, 24) - viewers are taking action against offensive programmes with unprecedented force. The Duty log is dead and religions are taking to the streets; controllers risk death threats and producers risk direct action. We take you on a tour through the duty log and public responses to controversial programming to investigate where the limits should be and whether they should exist at all.

X-Rated News:

Iraqi hostage videos, Tsunami devastation, schoolchildren under terrorist siege; the news is going hardcore but is it pushing the limits of taste and decency too far? How and when does the decision to broadcast graphic footage take place? Is it technology and the internet that's really driving change? Plus an interactive exercise in which you play the editor.

The poll results are a little too extensive to print here but as you may expect they are non too supportive of the nutters. The results are available at: www.yougov.com/archives/pdf/MGE050101002_3.pdf

From Slugger O'Toole
From Vacuum
Spotted by MediawatchWatch

The Vacuum High Court hearing starts next week

Factotum, the publishers of the controversial magazine The Vacuum will be appearing in the Belfast High Court next Tuesday 13th September as a result of a year long dispute with the Belfast City Council over its demand for an apology for offence caused in previous issues. The High Court hearings start at 10.30am but if you want to witness proceedings you are advised to arrive by 10am.

From The Vacuum:

A potentially landmark Human Rights case resulting from a year-long dispute between Belfast City Council and the free cultural newspaper The Vacuum is due to take place on Tuesday 13th September 2005.

The Council’s demand that the publication provide an apology to ‘citizens of the city’ and ‘members of the Council’ for offence caused in previous issues is being challenged in the High Court by one of the paper’s editors, Richard West, as a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. If successful, this will be the first time, since the coming into force of the Human Rights Act 1998, that a local authority will have been held to be in breach of an individual or organisation's right to freedom of expression as protected under the legislation.

The legal showdown comes amidst heated debate over the new Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill and its potential to curtail free expression. It also follows the debate about the play ‘Behzti’ (Dishonour) which was closed after violent protests by the Sikh community and the BBC received unprecedented numbers of complaints about the broadcast of 'Jerry Springer the Opera'.

The Belfast controversy arose from a single complaint from a member of the public concerning ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ themed issues of The Vacuum published in June 2004. Councillors reacted by describing it as ‘filth’, claiming that it was ‘encouraging devil worship’ and voting 24-12 to withhold an agreed funding allocation of £3,300 until an apology was provided. This prompted The Vacuum to hold a satirical 'Sorry Day' in December ridiculing the council's demand for an apology, but also raising serious questions about censorship and freedom of speech.

In stark contrast to the attitude of the city authorities towards The Vacuum, its publishers, Factotum, have been selected as part of a delegation of artists to represent Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale this summer. They have also been nominated for the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award and received commissions to produce new publications in London and Dublin. The paper currently has a circulation of 15,000, concentrated in Belfast where it is available to pick up in cafes, bars, libraries, galleries, cinemas and hotels, and is lauded for making a valuable contribution to cultural life in the city.

By Sandy Starr of Spiked

It's not just perverts who should be worried about the government's proposed ban on violent pornography.

The latest attempt by the UK authorities to regulate internet pornography is a proposed 'new offence of simple possession of extreme pornographic material which is graphic and sexually explicit and which contains serious violence towards women and men.

As Brendan O'Neill argues, this proposal is not a response to a surge in concern about violent pornography - the main justification given for it is an isolated murder that occurred two years ago. Rather, the proposal is a desperate attempt to assert some moral authority, at a time when sexual explicitness has become commonplace. This proposal is consistent with other recent developments in regulation and law, which have unfortunate consequences for our freedoms.

For all the appalling and depraved content available on the internet, it's important to keep in mind that this is just a communications medium. Ideas are exchanged, in the form of words, sounds and images, and that is all. But the distinction between ideas and actions has been progressively blurred of late, especially where the internet is concerned. Tenuous and anecdotal connections between internet content and criminal acts are often invoked. Looking at a representation of violence is often treated as though it were tantamount to committing a violent act.

The consultation document in which the government outlines its new proposal suggests that violent pornography depicts acts of criminal violence: 'We believe from the observations of the police and others who investigate it, that the material may often cause serious physical and other harm to those involved in making it; in some cases the participants are clearly the victims of criminal offences.' However, these claims are anything but clear - we are asked to take the unspecified 'observations of the police and others' on trust.

The document goes on to cast doubt upon the very notion that people might consent to be involved in the production of such pornography, referring to those who participate in the creation of sexual material containing violence, cruelty or degradation, who may be the victims of crime in the making of the material, whether or not they notionally or genuinely consent to taking part. 'Notional consent' is a weasel term, expressing the patronising assumptions of those in authority.

The true reason for the authorities seeking to confuse violent images with violent actions is expressed in the following passage from the consultation document: We intend to capture those scenes which appear to be real and are convincing, but which may be acted. This follows the precedent of the child pornography legislation and is in part necessary to avoid the need to prove the activity actually took place, as this would be an insuperable hurdle for the prosecution. There's the rub. In the absence of any evidence that actual criminal violence is involved in the production or consumption of internet pornography, those who wish to ban it propose to change the law, so that no such evidence is necessary.

This is part of a pattern. Each successive piece of UK legislation that has criminalised the possession and distribution of child pornography - the Protection of Children Act 1978, the Criminal Justice Act 1988, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and the Sexual Offences Act 2003 - has broadened the definition of the crime, so that evidence of child abuse is no longer necessary in order for someone to be prosecuted. Looking at an indecent image of a child - or even looking at a 'pseudo-photo' (doctored image) - is now a crime in and of itself. As I have argued previously on spiked, such developments represent the real emergence of what George Orwell, in his fictional dystopia 1984, called 'thoughtcrime'. The proposal to ban violent pornography simply extends this tendency into yet another ill-defined domain.

The consolation document also points towards a link between images and acts of violence, though there is little evidence to support this. The authors finally admit that we are unable... to draw any definite conclusions based on research as to the likely long term impact of this kind of material on individuals generally, or on those who may already be predisposed to violent or aberrant sexual behaviour. Chris Evans, founder of Internet Freedom, points out that 60 years of research into media effects shows no conclusive evidence that violent images cause violent acts.

Once we enter the world of thoughtcrime, and there is no longer any strict burden of proof upon prosecutors, the authorities enjoy considerable latitude to define criminality on a case-by-case basis. After all, whether or not something crosses the boundary into being pornographic or violent is in the eye of the beholder.

Home Office minister Paul Goggins and Scottish Executive minister Cathy Jamieson, the politicians spearheading the proposal to outlaw 'extreme' pornography, say that by "extreme" we mean material which is violent and abusive, featuring activities which are illegal in themselves and where, in some cases, participants may have been the victims of criminal offences. This definition is subjective and speculative - not ideal qualities for legislation that might land an individual in prison for several years. How can anyone establish whether participants may have been the victims of criminal offences, simply from an image?

A good lesson in the practical consequences of prosecuting individuals for accessing internet pornography, while disregarding the intractable problems of definition and proof, is the recent UK investigation Operation Ore. Operation Ore involved prosecuting individuals who had used their credit card details to access the website of the American company Landslide Productions, which had supposedly advertised and provided access to child pornography. The sheer number of individuals suspected and accused, as part of Operation Ore and its US progenitor Operation Avalanche, led to commentators questioning whether the police and the courts had anywhere near sufficient resources to tackle child pornography. At one stage, an amnesty whereby the public could hand over its child porn was mooted as the only feasible solution.

Computer forensic expert and investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who acted as an expert witness for several Operation Ore defendants who were subsequently acquitted, has examined the bungled investigation, which has led to at least 33 of the accused to date committing suicide.

In fact, the Landslide Productions website offered an automated payment system for all manner of adult websites. There was no way of telling, from the credit card details that were seized, precisely what type of pornography - if any - the accused had accessed. Campbell notes the irony that the only reason for the existence of the credit card data used in Operation Ore was the use of adult verification systems, whose purpose is to prevent children from accessing pornography.

According to Campbell, even the buttons and links on the Landslide Productions website, that were alleged to have invited the user to access child pornography, were either pop-ups and advertisements outside of the control of the website administrators, or they simply never existed. The authorities cited incriminating data found on suspects' computers, but Campbell argued successfully in court that such data may have derived from pop-ups or other circumstances outside of users' control.

Campbell points to 'systematic injustice' in Operation Ore, arguing that many people and their families...are the victims of a combination of technical naivety and fear, fed by a media circus. He warns that the stage may be set for a twenty-first century witch-hunt. The proposed new criminal offence of possessing violent pornography will only encourage such witch hunts, inviting ever more spurious prosecutions and convictions, while doing away with the need to prove that a criminal act was committed.

From Ekklesia

A ten-episode adult TV cartoon series scrapped by the BBC after protests about its alleged anti-Catholic content has gone Europe-wide on DVD - without so much as a murmur from opponents in the UK national press or media.

Popetown was commissioned by BBC Three in 2002, but was pulled from the schedules a year ago following 6,000 complaints by people who found its premise offensive. Alongside the plays Bezhti, Corpus Christi, and Jerry Springer – The Opera, Popetown had become a test case for what many see as religiously-based censorship.

Popetown is an animated sitcom which looks at daily nuisances in the workplace, with one major twist. The workplace in question is the Vatican and the CEO happens to be a brattishly portrayed 77-year-old Pope.

The Catholic Church in Britain was initially shocked by the idea of Popetown, and the BBC's Stuart Murphy finally decided to cancel it on grounds of lack of quality, declaring that there is a fine judgement line in comedy between the scurrilously funny and the offensive.

But when the Rt Rev Crispian Hollis, Bishop of Portsmouth, attacked the show by saying that any attempt to belittle or diminish [the Pope's] status as the leader of the Catholic Church is totally unacceptable, free speech campaigners were outraged.

The BBC said at the time that it might recoup some of the show's £2.5 million production costs through broadcast and video sales by BBC Worldwide and the series' creator, independent production firm Channel X.

On 8 June this year Popetown premiered on New Zealand's C4, gaining a 25% audience share among 15-29 year-olds. The Catholic Church there has repeatedly condemned the programme, and is in the midst of an official complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

However, New Zealand Catholic communications officer Lyndsay Freer originally said that she couldn't take it seriously enough to consider it harmful or offensive, according to the official Popetown website.

In Canada, meanwhile, Catholics are calling for a boycott of media conglomerate CanWest over its screening in July.

Revolver Productions, who put Popetown out on European Region DVD on Monday, say that it is an incredible piece of work with an outstanding cast, [and] we’re delighted to have acquired it despite stiff competition from bigger organisations.

Director Phil Ox told journalists last week: I am glad that it is finally out there, adding, with obvious tongue-in-cheek delight, I should just remind everybody that viewing this show can destroy your soul.

It is unclear why opponents in the UK appear to have gone quiet over the launch of Popetown on DVD. An exception was however Barry Hudd, press officer for the Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth. Following the DVD's launch on Monday he viewed four episodes of the controversial TV show: The first episode of Popetown I found lacking in humour and patiently silly and the subsequent episodes degenerated into gratuitous offence and insult to the Papacy.

When the original controversy broke, London vicar, philosophy lecturer and Ekklesia associate Giles Fraser said that The decision to withdraw Popetown suggests a religion that cannot laugh at itself, a religion of claustrophobic disapproval, a religion where control is smuggled in under the guise of sensitivity. OK, sometimes the laughter is cruel - but there are bigger issues at stake. For the ability to laugh at oneself is perhaps the most effective litmus test which detects healthy from dangerous religion.

From The Guardian

Twenty per cent of parents in homes with digital TV think the watershed is no longer relevant, according to a new survey. One in five parents now believes that advances in digital TV technology, which let viewers watch what they want, when they want, make the traditional 9pm cut-off point obsolete, the survey reveals.

The research undertaken for Homechoice, the digital TV service, shows that 43% of parents in digital TV homes believe they, rather than the regulator-set watershed, should determine what their children watch.

According to the survey, more than a third of parents would use a special child's remote control, which can bar anything other than kids' channels, while more than 20% would use personal PIN codes designed to prevent youngsters from accessing adult-oriented fare.

More and more of us are experiencing the ever-changing world of digital television. We can now have access to hundreds of channels and literally thousands of programmes at the touch of a button, said John Carr, an internet specialist at children's charity NCH. Before this new era, we were all able to rely on the trusted watershed. However, in the more complex world we now live in, service providers and parents both have a responsibility to protect children from unsuitable content that could be available at any time of the day."

According to responses from around 500 digital homes, less than 2% of parents think broadcasters should be solely responsible for regulating what their children watch, with 55% believing it should be shared between parents and broadcasters.

Though the majority of parents say they are still concerned about violence and sex on TV, twice as many were more concerned about scenes of graphic brutality than they were about sex.

It is encouraging that parents are taking an active interest in their children's viewing as digital technology continues to bring increased choice, said Roger Lynch, the chief executive and chairman of Homechoice. Before digital television, we relied on and trusted the watershed, but now we have to look at other ways to help keep the entertainment experience relevant and appropriate for the audience.

From India Times

Performing animals have found a friend in the Bombay high court.

A division bench of chief justice Dalveer Bhandari and justice D Y Chandrachud recently directed that producers of films and television advertisements cannot use animals or birds for shoots without registering them with the Animal Welfare Board of India.

The division bench ordered, The censor board shall in all cases where an animal has been used in the shooting of a film ask the film producer to produce a certificate from the Animal Welfare Board of India certifying that provisions of the Performing Animals (registration) rules have been complied with.

The ruling aims at ensuring observance of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and the requirements laid down in the Cinematograph (certification) Rules.

Such a certificate has to be filed before the film is certified for public screening. At present, the censor board simply seeks a declaration from the film producer that the animals were not treated cruelly during shooting.

From The Guardian by Edgar Forbes

We should be using the same mechanism as terrorists to get to the truth that lies beyond and behind the lenses of the cameramen

As the public and the press pour over the latest terrorist video to be aired on al-Jazeera, the question again arises whether it is right for us to see or be shown these words of war.

Is al-Jazeera a PR channel for terrorist propaganda? In reporting and further disseminating this video nasty, is our press just providing a further platform for airing these voices of hatred? At a time when parliament is legislating to ban subversive speech and banish those accused of engaging in it, is it right that our media are broadcasting the chilling message of Mohammed Sidique Khan that our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.

The answer has to be a resounding yes. To give his words life Khan and his accomplices drew their blood from hundreds of innocent victims. So why should we be allowed to listen to the words of Khan? Precisely because we need to know what and who we are dealing with. If we are targets we have a right to know why. We now know Khan's reasons, or some of them.

Mohammed Khan was wrong on so many levels but our response to his video should be to also prove wrong his statement that: I'm sure by now the media's painted a suitable picture of me, this predictable propaganda machine will naturally try to put a spin on things to suit the government and to scare the masses into conforming to their power and wealth-obsessed agendas.

The Hutton Inquiry and the protracted attempts to elicit the basis for going to war should act as a wake-up call to the press and its public to take debate to a new level.

What is fundamentally troubling is that attempts to get information about what is actually happening in Iraq and other parts of the world for which terrorists are holding us responsible, are being prevented by western armed forces. Moving on from the critique surrounding the decision to go to war, our next focus should be on the results of that decision. We know the results we've witnessed in London but what do we really know about what's happening to the people our armed forces have supposedly liberated? Getting the truth and the news to deliver it is proving a real problem in Iraq. The raft of briefings given to the media at press centres on military bases such as al-Sayliyah are sanitised versions of events delivered behind the bloody scenes of war and the conflict that has waged ever since.

Getting the grass-roots news out of Baghdad and surrounding areas is a perilous process. According to Reporters Sans Frontieres, 66 journalists and media workers have been killed since the conflict began in 2003, more than in the entire Vietnam war. What makes matters worse are how many of these have been the victims of so-called "friendly fire" by coalition forces.

It is worrying to see how a ground-level affront on press freedom and reporting is being waged against many of those journalists brave enough to risk life and limb to bring us closer to the fuller picture of what's really happening. Having been responsible for the deaths of numerous journalists, US forces don't seem to like the idea of free-roaming journalists getting behind-the-scenes footage.

Reuters journalists have been a particular target of the US forces who took cameraman Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani captive three weeks ago and are holding him without stating what, if any, the charges are. He is being denied any form of trial or access to legal representation. Widespread demands for his release have been met with intransigent rebuffs from the military who say that it will be at least another 60 days before anyone get to see him. This cannot be right.

Ali al-Mashhadani has since been joined by another Reuters cameraman, Haider Kadhem who was detained over "inconsistencies" in his statements and because military personnel didn't like some of the images they found on his equipment. Eyewitness accounts suggest that his only misdemeanour was to identify US troops as being those who fired at the car containing his colleague soundman Walee Khaled who was killed.

So how far is the US military prepared to go to cover up the sights they don't want us to see or report on. Given the fact that Reuters is a global news organisation with a reputation for impartial newsgathering, why the suspicion of its staff? US forces are also behind the killing of two Reuters cameramen. Having worked for the news agency for over a decade Mazen Dana was gunned down while filming outside Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 amid various unsatisfactory explanations why he was targeted. Earlier that year a US tank gunner opened fire on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad killing Reuters cameraman Tara Prostyuk who had been standing on his balcony. The hotel was known as a base for journalists covering the conflict but US forces claimed that Iraqi troops were also there. Another Spanish cameraman, Jose Couso also died in the incident.

To the extent terrorists are sending us their messages through the media, we should be using the same mechanism to get to the truth that lies beyond and behind the lenses of the cameramen US troops are so keen to suppress.

Unfettered Public Meeting

Following the publication of this consultation document, Unfettered is organising a free public meeting in London on Friday September 9th to discuss the BDSM community's response to the proposals therein.

Meeting

Date: Friday 9th September

Time: From 7:30

Venue: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn WC1

More details on www.backlash-uk.org.uk

And  an original line of thought at www.smartgroups.com/groups/Backlash:

Creating the offence of viewing bestiality pictures (real or simulated) would lead to a bizarre situation where someone could be locked up for three years (with all that it would entail for their personal life and reputation) for looking at pictures of someone else having sex with an animal, while at the same time the state (ie. taxpayers) would be paying to serve up dead animals on their plate every day for dinner. As we all know, animals do not consent to being killed for food and we will all disagree on whether such an activity should be permitted in society. But the fact remains that it is permitted, and for as long as it remains so, jailing people for viewing bestiality pictures is as pointless, preposterous and contradictory as it sounds.

From The Observer

In a blood-stained slaughterhouse, a brute of a man strips off. He is tall and strong, with a lot of erect-and-glistening going on. He grins as he rapes an elderly teacher in front of his captive audience of deaf children. Then there's the chap whose hobby it is to stalk, bind and tie a helpless woman, before first removing her uterus and only later slitting her throat. And the one who cuts a deep cross into his blind victim's belly before he rapes... well...

Appreciative that for many of you it is breakfast time, I shall stop there. But if you're enjoying the stories so far, you'll be thrilled to learn that there is much, much more detail to be found, not, as you might have expected, in scurrilous video nasties, but in best-selling books: in order, Jeffery Deaver's A Maiden's Grave, Tess Gerritsen's The Surgeon and Karin Slaughter's Blindsighted. All are available from Waterstone's, although if you opt for WH Smith, you can currently buy all three for the price of two. Bargain.

There is a long tradition in thrillers that the more demonic the perpetrator the greater is the reader's sense of urgency that he be caught. It is more recent, I fancy, that authors trip over themselves to create the wickedness in the form of ever more imaginative, depraved, sexual predators out to defile women.

I don't know why this need be so, any more than I know why most are actually written by women, but let us lament that another day.

What I do know is that as long as this trend continues, it renders ridiculous the Home Office move to outlaw the watching of violent sexual internet images. This is just cheap, gissa-vote populist politics: 'Bring it into line with laws on child pornography' is a kneejerk special, but doesn't address the issue of consent: adults can consent to play a part in the images; children, by definition, cannot.

It is a product of sentiment, not reason, campaigned for passionately by Liz Longhurst, whose daughter died at the hands of a sexual weirdo. No one would deny her the right to bellow, but when she says: 'If the furniture of peoples' minds is polluted with this stuff, they can become very dangerous', she simply cannot prove the cause and effect she thus infers. It is equally likely that the weirdo is drawn to the internet images because he's a weirdo, just as it's likely that he reads the authors above, getting from their persistent imagery some kick that you and I do not.

But one person's distaste is not reason enough for another's constraint and, in any case, we cannot have it both ways: either we accept violent sexual activity for recreational purposes or we do not.

To say it's OK in one medium but not another is a dangerous snobbery of form over content, suggesting, as it does, that the literate man is less likely to become a serial sexual killer than his thick clod of a web-watching cousin. An unwise assumption, if ever I heard one.

The UK TV premiere of Taxi Zum Klo is on Film Four Channel on Friday 16th September (midnight). People will finally get to see whether the BBFC has indeed passed a golden shower.

Channel 4 Listing

Radio Times Listing

From Express India

Adult Tamil movie New had a new lease of life with the Supreme Court on Monday staying the order of the Madras High Court, which had directed revocation of its Censor Board certificate on the ground it promoted vulgarity.

A Bench comprising Justice H.K. Sema and Justice B.N. Srikrishna, hearing a petition filed by the producer of the film, issued notice to Dravidar Kazhagam media secretary A. Arulmozhi, on whose petition the High Court had passed the order on August 5, 2005.

Appearing for the petitioner, senior advocate Mukul Rohtagi contended the High Court wrongly felt that the movie would influence young minds despite the fact the film was given an ‘A’ certificate restricting its viewership to those over 18 years of age.

The High Court had directed the State Film Censor Board to revoke the certification of New holding that it had been filmed for the purpose of ‘arousing sensual feelings’ of its viewers, especially the young.

From LA Times

The notion persists that all readers are kids, which places more restrictions on what comic book characters can say.

Comics have gained a certain gravitas in recent years: Graphic novels get reviewed alongside conventional books, and universities offer courses on comic book theory. There has been a glut of news stories telling us of comics' newfound maturity. The courts, though, have not adapted so readily.

We still have to deal with prosecutors who will look at a jury and say, 'Come on — comics are for kids. Let's call a spade a spade,'  says Charles Brownstein of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. It's a stigma, he says, that still causes problems for the industry when it comes to obscenity charges or arguing fair usage in copyright cases. That's why Brownstein's group has earned gratitude — and often financial support — from those in the comics world.

With a three-person staff, the defense fund is run out of a small office on Madison Avenue in New York. They've recently moved operations from Northampton, Mass. The nonprofit organization was founded by comic book artist Dennis Kitchen in 1986, more than 30 years after the industry's first major run-in with the authorities — a Senate hearing on the destructive influence of comics on children. Things didn't go comics' way that day, and a restrictive Comics Code Authority was soon established. Ever since, comics and the law have had a strained relationship.

The field of comics law is littered with weird details. One landmark case involved two villainous half-human, half-worm brothers named Johnny and Edgar Autumn who graced the pages of DC Comics. They happen to look a lot like the musicians Johnny and Edgar Winter. Less than flattered, the Winter brothers sued in 1996 on such grounds as defamation and invasion of privacy.

There's been progress, Tom Batiuk says, but comics still struggle for the same acceptance as books and movies.  The defense fund's efforts are important for an industry with few financial resources, Miller says. Book publishers and movie studios have plenty of resources to fight censorship attempts, but the comics industry mainly consists of artists with day jobs and mom-and-pop stores.

Interesting to note that selling hardcore is considered such a serious crime. It strikes me that any one selling their legal R18s on the likes of eBay could be precluded from working in schools and colleges.

From Herts & Essex News

A man who was given a job by Hertford Regional College was shocked when the Criminal Records Bureau wrongly identified him as a seller of hardcore pornography.

Having led crime free life, David Mansfield had assumed the routine background check would be a formality. But instead he was blocked from starting work as a learning support officer for six months while he waited for the bureaucratic blunder to be cleared up.

There was no sense of urgency, said Mansfield, The CRB is a shambolic organisation that has no idea how to be customer oriented.

The ordeal for Mansfield began when he received a copy of the disclosure document sent to the college: As soon as I saw that, alarm bells started to ring. It said I had been fined for selling hardcore pornography in Bournemouth in 1972. Why couldn't it be riding a bike without lights? Of course, Hertford Regional College had no alternative but to withdraw the job offer, and I then set about the appeals process."

After much form-filling, sending off passport photos and offering to give his fingerprints, Mansfield endured three months of frustrating delays before enlisting the help of MP Mark Prisk. I used to phone them every week. The most aggravating part was that nobody seemed keen to expedite it."

Eventually, he received confirmation from the CRB that his 'conviction' had been a big mistake, and is now looking forward to starting work this month. They thanked me for helping to put right the error on their database, but there was no mention of an apology whatsoever," said Mansfield who is considering legal action over the fiasco. If I'm a victim, how many other victims are there?"

A Home Office spokeswoman said: While we cannot comment on individual cases, the CRB acts as quickly as possible in such cases but is reliant on swift responses from both the applicants and the data owners.

Thought of the Day: To all those supporting the Home Office repression:

You may consider yourself one of John Beyer's "good living people" and correctly have nothing to fear from the Government's repressive proposals....BUT... are you absolutely sure that your husband, son or grandson isn't into bondage or spanking videos? Would you really like their family to suffer the 5am police raid, humiliation, imprisonment, loss of job and marriage?...

Do you really want this to happen to other people's families?  Do you really think that imprisonment and family ruin is an appropriate punishment for viewing consensual and staged pornography (even if it does depict non consensual spanking and bondage)?

Mediawatch Welcome Plans to Imprison Violent Porn Viewers

From Mediawatch-UK

The director of mediawatch-uk, John Beyer, has welcomed the Home Office announcement that it plans to make illegal the viewing and downloading of violent and abusive pornography on the Internet.

Mr Beyer said that he agreed entirely with Home Office Minister, Paul Goggins MP, that such material had no place in our society or, he said, in any civilised society. He voiced support for the campaign waged by Mrs Longhurst and applauded her success in persuading the Government to introduce the necessary legislation.

Mr Beyer said today that the measures proposed will not satisfy the dismay and unease felt by many good living people who object to the imposition of pornographic material and the sexualised culture everywhere in the media. There is plenty of research evidence concluding that the widespread availability of pornography is harmful to society because it presents a false view of human sexuality where people are no more that objects for gratification. Pornography is not about love or commitment or sacrifice. The annually rising rate of violent sexual crime is a good indicator of the harmful influence of pornography. The murder of Miss Longhurst is the tip of a very large iceberg. Pornography is about exploitation of others and its corrupting effect undermines human dignity turning intimacy into a spectator sport.

We hope that the legislation announced today will lead to a wide ranging review of the pornography industry and result in a long overdue strengthening of the criminal law.

Shaun Replies

Well Mr. Beyer,

It seems you've shown yourself in your true colours... In that you want to make criminals out of previously innocent private individuals, in supporting our repressive government's position of criminalisation of possession of certain forms of violent pornography, and bestiality.

This never used to be your stated position, on this issue.

It seems that even the contributors of the Daily Mail internet forum do not agree with you for the most part:

http://chat.dailymail.co.uk/dailymail/threadnonInd.jsp?forum=105&thread=9707135

I sincerley hope your own MediaWatch members concur with your position, because otherwise you'll be out of a job. Most of them, I suspect, believe in fair play, and might well disagree with your opinion that private people (rather than suppliers) should now be turned into criminals and put in jail, for what they keep in their houses.

Criminalisation of the possession of child pornography is one thing, because the evidence of harm caused to the children depicted is proporionate. But the same CANNOT be said about ANY other material whatsoever, and this is a step change too far for the government's power. Indeed they will undermine the message sent by criminalisation of child pornography, by making possession of other material similarly illegal.

Perhaps in my collection of adult videos, I might well have some pictures of *staged* sexual violence somewhere or other.

Would you really like to see my family destroyed, and the police come hammering on my door at 5.00AM, my children (Sarah and Nathan) robbed of their computers, and perhaps even my marriage destroyed, if I don't manage to destroy all these pictures ?

Is that want you REALLY want for people.

I'm sure you do. Perhaps you might even care to report me to the police at the appropriate time, if and when the law changes ? Let me know if you do, and I'll make sure you have the full address.....

Preventing access is one thing. Making criminals out of ordinary people is quite another.

Worthy of hatred or what?

From The Guardian

A mob that razed a dozen homes over an alleged affair between a Christian man whose family owns the beer factory and a Muslim woman from a neighbouring village who was then murdered by her own family.

The attack on Taybeh, a wholly Christian village which gives its name to a popular Palestinian beer, came despite appeals from residents to their neighbours in Deir Jarir to refrain from violence while the body of the murdered 25-year-old woman, identified only as Haim, was disinterred for DNA tests to try to ascertain if she had sex with the accused man, Mahdi Abu Houria.

Because we were afraid of what would happen, we got permission from Abu Mazen [the Palestinian president] to dig her up from her grave and have DNA testing, said Maria Khoury, the wife of Taybeh's mayor We are very suspicious that this family raped their daughter and buried her and they want to find an excuse to destroy our village.

The accused woman was murdered by her family last week in an "honour killing" after the alleged affair was made public. Palestinian women's groups say that women are sometimes killed after being raped by relatives who then attempt to shift responsibility for pregnancy to an innocent man.

Despite the pleas to wait for the results of the DNA test, Taybeh's residents say hundreds of men descended on the village in the middle of the night. They came from Deir Jarir, the Muslim village, armed, and they threw petrol and they lit up one home right after another, said Mrs Khoury.

They burned 12 homes down which are those of the accused man and every member of his family, third cousins, fourth cousins, anyone related. We have 12 homeless families without clothes, without anything. These are fanatics who take the law into their own hands. If one person is guilty that person deserves punishment, not the whole village.

The government's declaration of war on ‘extreme material’ is about politics more than pornography.

by Brendan O'Neill of Spiked

So the government has declared war on extreme and violent porn. Where did that come from? Yesterday was your average, boring, no-news August day when officials suddenly revealed that they were looking into criminalising the possession - ie. downloading - of 'extreme material' from the internet, specifically material that depicts 'intercourse or oral sex with an animal', 'sexual interference with a human corpse', 'serious violence in a sexual context', or 'serious sexual violence'. They propose a maximum three-year jail term for individuals who download such material. In the space of 24 hours, we went from news reports about Britain's hot weather and Kylie's first post-cancer appearance in public to handwringing headlines about rape, bestiality, necrophilia, and the threat posed by gross out porn to the fabric of society (1).

It sounds scary, but this is merely a mutation (or perhaps a perversion) of the silly season story. Government officials have transformed a minority pursuit - looking at degrading porn on the web - into a moral panic, and presented themselves as brave crusaders who are 'determined to act' against material that 'would be abhorrent to most people and has no place in our society' (2). This is about politics more than porn: in our anything-goes age - where 'normal' porn has been made cool by Hollywood, trendy art galleries and even WH Smith's (more of which in a minute) - the authorities are scrabbling about for something, anything, on which to hold the line. It doesn't say much when they can only pose as moral crusaders against weirdos who like to roleplay rape and shag sheep.

In the Consultation on the Possession of Extreme Pornographic Material, published by the Home Office and the Scottish Executive, the authors claim 'there has been increasing public concern about the availability of extreme material'. Where? The vast majority of people don't look at violent porn, or think very much about it; they certainly aren't agitating publicly for the government to save our souls from it. The document says the public's concern is 'highlighted by the case of a young woman who was murdered by a man who had been accessing extreme porn', referring to the 2003 killing of Jane Longhurst by Graham Coutts, who was apparently 'addicted' to extreme porn sites that depicted women being strangled and raped (3). Longhurst's family has been campaigning for new laws.

The murder of Jane Longhurst is mentioned three times in the document - every time a reference is made to 'increasing public concern', in fact. It would be more accurate to describe this consultation as a kneejerk response to a horrible, isolated murder than a consideration of the public's concern about violent porn. The authorities are proposing new legislation in response to the actions of one demented individual; they have transformed an exceptionally rare incident into a gruesome morality tale about the alleged impact of extreme porn on people's volatile minds, and reserved the role of protector of public safety for themselves.

For a consultation on extreme pornographic material, the document says seriously little about what this material is, where it is, how many people are accessing it, or what its effects can be. What exactly is extreme porn? 'It is not possible in a public document like this to give a great deal of graphic detail or description of the material in question.' Does such porn really warp people's minds and make them do bad things? 'We do not yet have sufficient evidence from which to draw any definite conclusions as to the likely long-term impact of this kind of material on individuals generally.' (Though this doesn't stop them from arguing, more than once, that aberrant sexual material might drive individuals to commit 'aberrant sexual acts'.)

How many people are accessing violent porn? 'According to a major research study…57 per cent of 9 to 19-year-olds who use the internet at least once a week had come into contact with pornography online. [But] the study did not distinguish between types of pornography.' In short: dunno.

The document also blurs the distinction between depictions of violent acts and real violent acts. It proposes criminalising possession of both 'explicit actual scenes' of violence and 'realistic depictions…which appear to be real and are convincing, but which may be acted' (4). I'm no expert on violent porn (but then again, neither are the authors of this report) but I would hazard a guess that most of this stuff is made by consenting adults, for cash, who are only pretending to do nasty things to each other. Yet this document lumps together acted-out rapes with real rapes, as if it's easy to download a video of woman being raped for real from the internet. Again, little evidence is presented that actual, criminal rapes are widely available, or even available at all, on the world wide web. What next: a consultation document on outlawing snuff movies?

The authors tie themselves in knots over what will be allowed and what won't be. So it will still be okay to possess images of 'milder forms of bondage and humiliation, which are common place in pornographic material', so long as you don't cross the line into imagery that 'depicts suffering, pain, torture and degradation of a kind which we believe most people would find abhorrent'. Who will decide when that line has been crossed? Will acts of bondage have to be re-enacted in a court of law, so that a jury or judge can decide if it's only 'mild humiliation' or something more 'abhorrent'? (Insert joke about judges and bondage here.) The document proposes that only possession of photographs or videos should be criminalised, so it will be all right to possess text or cartoons that describe or depict violent sexual scenarios. Yet if the authorities truly believe that extreme pornographic material can provoke extreme acts of violence, why should we be free to read about this stuff but not look at people acting it out?

It isn't especially surprising that the document reveals little about the availability or impact of violent porn, and that it gets confused about how to define it - because violent porn isn't really the issue. Rather, this is a highly politicised attempt by government officials to score some moral points. One reason why they have chosen to do that by launching a war against the extreme fringes of the porn world is because they have lost the argument about everyday porn. There was a time when governments railed against pornography, banging on about how it cheapened sexual relations, demeaned women, and posed a threat to family values and morality in general. But today, porn has gone mainstream: art institutions like the ICA host debates about porn; Hollywood has glamourised porn in movies like Boogie Nights, Wonderland and The People Vs Larry Flynt; the once-stuffy BBFC now passes, uncut, films that show explicit sex; teenagers wear t-shirts that say 'Porn star in training', and can even buy Playboy pencil cases and stationery from WH Smith's (5).

This mainstreaming of porno-culture isn't a consequence of some positive impulse to challenge censorship or usher in a new era of sexual liberation. Rather it points to deep moral uncertainties in our 'anything goes' age. As the BBFC said when it passed the sexually explicit 9 Songs at the end of last year, it feels less able to make 'moral decisions' because 'what is morally wrong for one person is not morally wrong for another' (6). In such a climate, feeling their moral authority draining away, the authorities are forced to look for new lines to hold - which explains their turn towards porn that depicts extreme, violent, rapacious or bestial sex. And the more they lose their moral bearings the more, and harder, we can expect them to clamp down on what is still seen as unacceptable, on things that are 'abhorrent to most people', as the consultation document says again and again.

This consultation suggests that the government has a pretty low opinion of the public. Despite its self-confessed lack of evidence that extreme porn provokes extreme behaviour, it still justifies its proposal as an attempt to 'protect society' from material 'which may encourage interest in violent or aberrant sexual activity' (7). In short, we are rapists-in-the-making, who might be excited into committing a terrible act if we happen upon degrading pictures or videos (but not text or cartoons, apparently). They see us as perverts or potential perverts - which is a bit rich coming from those who made violent and extreme porn into a big issue in the first place. Who knows, they might even have inadvertently encouraged some individuals to go looking for such material.

From the Mail & Guardian

A couple trying to walk the length of Britain in the nude were due to appear in court on Friday after being grabbed by police south of Edinburgh following a complaint by a member of the public.

So-called "Naked Rambler" Stephen Gough and his girlfriend, Melanie Roberts, were arrested for an alleged breach of the peace on Thursday.

Public nudity is illegal in Britain but that has not stopped Gough attempting a second trek wearing nothing but boots, a hat and a rucksack.

The former Royal Marine walked the 1 363km length of Britain from Land's End in south-west England to John O'Groats on the north-east tip of Scotland in 2003/04. He was arrested 14 times and served two jail terms during the trip.

The couple are due to appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in Scotland. A Lothian and Borders Police spokesprude said: At 12.06pm yesterday [Thursday], we received a call regarding a naked male and female walking along the Roslin North Road towards Bilston in Midlothian, wearing backpacks. They were apparently being followed by a camera crew. They were detained in custody to appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court today.

From The Times

The sale of DVDs of bare-knuckle fights by Irish travellers has been stopped by eBay who removed the film from sale on Friday because it contravened the website’s policy of not selling products that incite violence.

Its operators objected, in particular, to a warning displayed on the product which said: This DVD is not for the faint-hearted as these boys mean business and blood is drawn regularly.

Titled Bare Knuckle Fights, Irish Travellers Boxing Straightners, the footage was described by its England-based vendor as: bare-knuckle fighting with gypsies involved in straightners, fighting for family pride and women as only these gypsies know how. An image was also supplied, featuring two topless men circling in a crowd with their fists raised.

A spokesperson for eBay said: The sale of DVDs of bare-knuckle fights isn’t illegal. For instance, the Ultimate Fighting Championship which films men in cages bare-knuckle fighting is broadcast on Sky. But, if they incite violence, we take them down.

Another DVD, Gypsy Bare Knuckle Fights Video, was not deemed to be contravening eBay’s policy, however, and is still available to buy through an online auction on the website. A spokesperson for the Irish Travellers’ Movement (ITM) condemned the sale of the camcorder tapes. This came up about two years ago. Unfortunately, there are people making these videos, obviously these people are adults and can do what they like, but we wouldn’t condone it — there’s no association with ITM. They are offensive and eBay shouldn’t be selling them.

From The Times

The BBC is launching a cinema-style classification to warn parents of programmes containing sex, violence and strong language. Programmes suitable mostly for adults are to be labelled with the symbol “G” for “guidance”.

Initially the G-certificate will be available only to people viewing on their computers, but audiences using the next generation of televisions should be able to click on the symbol on their screens to be alerted to the adult content. The symbol could eventually replace the traditional 9pm watershed.

The corporation is introducing the system to coincide with the release of most of the output of BBC1, BBC2 and its other networks on the internet. Many of its radio programmes are already available “on demand” in this way for seven days after they have been broadcast.

Because viewers will be able to watch programmes from the previous week’s output whenever they want, children will no longer be protected by the conventional watershed.

Initially only 5,000 viewers taking part in a trial this month of the BBC’s system for downloading programmes — the “integrated media player” — will encounter the G-system. Now, any BBC programme included in the new service will have to be classified as G or non-G.

If downloading television programmes on computer becomes nationally available — the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson is hoping to win the governors’ approval to launch it next year — the G-symbol will become familiar in almost every household and is likely to be adopted by other broadcasters. We need to give audiences the equivalent of a new watershed, to give them a different signpost,” said Rachel Hermer, the BBC adviser on editorial policy.

Parents will be able to adjust computers so children cannot watch G-rated programmes without permission.

From Glamsham

Central Board of Film Certification chairperson Sharmila Tagore criticised the brouhaha over the film Mangal Pandey - The Rising that has been slapped with legal notices for distorting facts. It is only a film and a story told in a certain manner... it is not history, so why are people making so much out of it? I don't understand.

Her remarks came shortly after the Delhi High Court issued notices to Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, who played the title role in the film, actress Rani Mukherjee and five others on a suit seeking a stay on the screening of Mangal Pandey - The Rising.

The court asked them to respond by Sep 21 to the suit filed by Raghunath Pandey and Onkarnath Pandey, who claim that they are descendants of Mangal Pandey, the Indian sepoy widely believed to have triggered what is known as India's first war of independence in 1857.

Among other things, the suit alleged that the film had shown Mangal Pandey in a relationship with a nautch girl, which they said was "out of context" and "unhistorical".

They have pleaded for the offending portions to be deleted before the film is screened further.

Tagore said such debates were an attempt to breed sectarianism in a secular country like India. This will divide the country all the more. We have to be more proactive - it is unfortunate that a film that depicts the hero of the first war of independence should be dragged into so much controversy.

Selected comments from the forum at The Times

The Government is heading for yet another foul-up in its attempts to solve potential problems by knee-jerk fixes. They are going to have to clearly define what constitutes "unacceptable" violent and abusive pornography. Will these laws also apply to television? Current programmes often contain scenes of violence towards and abuse of women (and men), often with sexual overtones. Where exactly will they stop? What is abhorrent to one person may be perfectly acceptable to another. Surely the dividing line here should be "consenting adults" - ie, anything which involves adults only and to which all parties freely consent - should be acceptable. Clearly, any acts involving minors or animals fall outside this proviso and would thus be legislated against.
Bob Finbow

"Violent sexual pornography on the internet is to be banned by the Government." Oh good! Perhaps next they'll get around to banning those annoying rain showers on bank holidays. Once again, our Government has chosen to pass laws prohibiting something over which they have little or no control.
John Blackley

What people decide to view and do in their own bedrooms should always remain their choice, as long as it stays in the bedroom.
James Hassell

Ban pornography? Who will decide what is "violent"? This Government is going too far. We do not need nannyism anymore. We are adults and we will view what we please!
William Shearer

Why this great urge to censor things which, on the whole, will be used by individuals in their own homes and won't pose a threat to anybody? While there seems to be less censorship in the cinema and on the television, which is to be applauded, there seems to be a wish to clamp down on internet usage. This will have no effect other than to increase the use of remote storage devices (external hard drives and the like), while tying up police and security resources that could be better used elsewhere.
David Leslie

Assuming that the models in the photos know what they are getting themselves into then I see no harm. Some people like and enjoy bondage just the same as some people like and enjoy sleeping with people of the same sex.
Name and address withheld

While I think it would be a good idea to ban all porn it will be an absolute minefield to prosecute those downloading it from the internet. Where do you draw the line at "violent porn"? It is so easy to open up a page by accident, so any law would be totally unjust. How about the adult channels on TV? No half measures please. Ban them all at source or forget it.
Robert Johnson

From Shaun

I have put some of my initial responses to three of the questions, down to share with other respondents on the site, to give them some ideas. These are preliminary. points, and do not constitute what is to be my final response to the questions:

Evidence of Harm (Page 9)
2. In the absence of conclusive research results as to its possible negative effects, do you think that there is some pornographic material which is so degrading, violent or aberrant that it should not be tolerated?

That it should not be tolerated, without proper evidence of harm, is no justification for criminalisation of its posession... In this clause you ACTUALLY ADMIT there is no conclusive evidence of harm. Therefore prohibition and criminalisation (especially of possession) should NOT be an option for you. Might I politely remind you that we do not live in a country like Iran (as yet) but live in a free western democracy ?

Content of Material (Page 11)
3. Do you agree with the list of material set out (in paragraph 39)?

No. I don't agree with any of it.

Most violent material is staged. It will be difficult for you to distinguish what is, and isn't staged. Nor do you specify (and fully justify) exactly what is to be criminalised..

Bestiality though very distasteful, and quite disgusting, can actually be harmless to everyone involved in the making.

Please be sure you are not criminalising material on the grounds of distaste, rather than harm.

Distaste is no reason to ban anything, and CERTAINLY no reason to criminalise possession. This is clearly a step change too far, for the power of government to dictate what we might look at in our own homes. Criminalisation of child pornography is one thing, but it should END there.

Only in the case of child pornography, is the harm caused to the particpants in proportion to the measures taken against it, including criminalisation of possession. I will NEVER be convinced, (nor will any sane and rational person in my opinion) that the material you want to ban, is in any way equivalent to child pornograpy. Indeed you are about to undermine the unique message that criminalisation of possession of ONLY child pornography sends out, by including other material.

I would also suggest that if the case for criminalisation of this material was so overwhelming, it would be easy for you to show proportionate harm. In the consultation document no where is the harm in proportion to the action you wish to take.

4. Do you believe there is any justification for being in possession of such material?

It is not a matter that the owner of such material should have to justify, the reason why he or she should want to possess it. Those who wish to rob them of the right to own certain images, must justify the reason why such a right should be denied. Under the Human Rights Act, I DO NOT have to state why I should have a freedom. The authorities have to state why this freedom should not be allowed. Their justification must also be "more than necessary", proportionate, and justified. NOWHERE in this consultation is there any kind of proportionate justification for this blatent repression of free people. Nor are the content of the pictures which are to be criminalised accurately described. If you were to go ahead with this, it would be a GROSS violation of peoples Human Rights, and it is clear you are censoring in the most part on the grounds of distaste, rather than harm. Such repression, by government "should have no place, in any society which considers itself a free one".

In Spain nothing is censored or criminalised other than child pornography. Everything else is freely and legally available. You should be able to gather plenty of empirical evidence of the harm caused by it, to justify your position. I challenge you do to so, before robbing freeborn people of their human rights to make up their own mind.

From the BBC

Police in Indian-administered Kashmir have arrested the leader and six other members of an all-women separatist group fighting against 'obscenity'.

The Maryam Squad of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat (Daughters of the Nation) had launched a campaign against alcohol and prostitution in the state.

The seven women were arrested after raiding a restaurant in Srinagar.

Asiya Andrabi is a well-known separatist leader. She has previously spent a year in jail. Asiya was arrested when she assaulted a married woman who with her husband at the restaurant, senior police officer Muneer Khan told Reuters. Who are they to impose their code of conduct? he asked.

Before her arrest Ms Andrabi said: "Indians are fighting on several fronts in Kashmir and the moral degradation in our Muslim society is part of their plan. We decided to counter this.

Over the past week the group has raided a number of hotels suspected of selling liquor and suspected brothels.
It also issued a diktat to operators of restaurants and internet cafes to remove booths where there are reports of young men and women getting intimate.

Alcohol shops as well as cinemas were closed down in the Kashmir Valley in the autumn of 1989 after the outbreak of separatist violence. They have started re-opening in some areas in the past couple of years.

The Dukhtaran-e-Milat launched a campaign for the wearing of the burqa by Muslim women in the early 1990s.
Its activists sprayed paint on women who did not wear a burqa. The campaign succeeded but its success was short-lived. A large majority of women have abandoned the veil.

Obviously the surprisingly extensive BDSM community is under massive threat from the knee jerking activities at the Home Office. Here is a pertinent question from British Spanking which gets a very alarming response. It does seem that the legislation will criminalise an enormous quantity of material that is patently consensual in its production but depicts non consensual acts. This could turn out as one of the nastiest pieces of censorship legislation ever seen. Shame on the Home Office

From www.britishspanking.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23088

Brigella mailed the official board direct, asking if spanking material were included, and this is the reply I received:

The proposals would cover pornography in all forms, whether on a website, in a magazine, video or any other form. If the spanking or corporal punishment (in a sexual context) being depicted was so severe that it could be charged as serious assault (or in England grievous bodily harm) then such images would be included in the proposals. However if the actions being depicted were less severe (eg consensual and no injury was caused), then they would be very unlikely to be included in the proposals.

Yours sincerely,

Susie
Criminal Law Branch 2
Justice Department

Brigella: Thanks for your reply, but I have two points I'd like clarified if I may:

• In a spanking video, there are usually severe cane welts, and general bruising, would this constitute grievious bodily harm?
• The scenarios rarely portray a consensual scene, would this be seen to infringe the new proposals?

Susie: I’m afraid I can’t give you a definitive answer on your first point. I think it most cases spanking would not constitute grievous bodily harm (in English law) unless it was particularly severe, but it would depend on the precise image and would be a matter for the courts to decide on the facts of the particular. Scots law is even more subjective and therefore even more difficult to give a definitive answer I’m afraid.

However I realise that this isn’t particularly helpful in clarifying the issue. I would therefore suggest that you explain which types of material (if any) you think it should be illegal to possess, and also if you have any comments about how it should be defined then that would also be helpful – as you can see, there may be drawbacks in using the various legal definitions of assault.

On the second, the proposed position is that it would be whether the material depicts serious sexual violence (or other images) which would determine whether it would be unlawful to possess an image. In some images it may not be easy to determine whether acts were consensual. In others, serious violence may be used to force an act in the absence of consent and the serious violence used would mean that it would be unlawful to possess an image. Again, we would welcome your views on these proposals and whether they should include reference to whether material is consensual.

The Government don't seem to be getting the substantial support they were hoping for.

Selected opinion from BBC forums

The actions of one individual should not lead to this sort of ban. It is the old "Grand Theft Auto made me do it" argument. Stop finding scapegoats and take some responsibility. The material in question has been available online for years. Why is now, due to the actions of one individual, that it should be banned? The whole point of the internet is that it is not government controlled. Banning certain content is restricting free speech.
Graham Flett

Believe it or not, some of this violent stuff is in fact consensual, so where do we draw the line? Are we going to ban the consensual stuff too? What will be banned from being looked at online? As much as I may feel sick by the thought that people enjoy looking at this stuff, the alternative of banning everything we don't like sends even more shivers down my spine.
Nathan James

Surely the internet should be about free access to any material. Do the government believe if they ban such images, the desire to view them by certain people will disappear. Absurd!
M Noon

Why is anyone surprised at new censorship laws? The UK is always up for banning things the middle classes don't like, and after the London bombings, they are on full "ban it" mode. In fact, their current rant resembles a "ban everything and make everything we don't like illegal" mode, and it supports the best traditions of the lets-ban-it-and hope-it-goes-away reaction, so familiar to UK parliaments. The "banned" list is long, and gets longer every day. At this rate, soon doing anything at all will be illegal and everyone will be arrested for everything.
M Parker

It is clear to me that non-consensual acts of any kind should be illegal, however if the porn in question is safe, sane and consensual I don't see what the problem is. To argue that it causes people to be violent has been repeatedly proved to be somewhat unfounded and it is possible that if people who want to see this sort of thing cannot then they will be more likely to commit it themselves.
Adam

Whose definition of "violent and abusive" is going to be used? I seem to remember that lingerie adverts were banned on the London Underground because they were regarded as abusive. Once again this government is using an authoritarian sledgehammer to crack an admittedly distasteful nut.
David Anderson

This Government seem to want to ban everything they don't agree with. Banning this material is the wrong way to go in any event. ISP's should be forced to accept a global code of conduct and take responsibility for the sites they host.
Paul S

The sort of person who goes out and strangles someone because they saw it in porn is the same sort of person who would go out and punch somebody because they had been watching a boxing match. We should concentrate instead on promoting strength of character, and a good moral code. How will people learn to make up their minds themselves if every important choice is made for them?
Tim

So people never had thoughts about violent sex before the internet? Take away the internet, take away films, take away TV, take away books, and I dare suggest that people will still have such thoughts.
Lee, Hebburn

We are on a very slippery slope here. One man's obscenity is another's sexual preference. As a gay man, some find my sexual practices obscene and depraved. How long before someone like me is prosecuted for looking at, what they deem to be okay, but many might find depraved. I remember the S&M trails of the 80's when people were jailed for consensual S&M sex.
Anon

I worked for 12 years in the Crown Prosecution Service. Before we decided to prosecute under the Obscene Publications Act, we had to watch the videos for evident violence or pain. Despite material being depraved and sickening, juries were reluctant to convict, possibly on the basis that what consenting adults watch or do is a matter for them. I think the new proposals are doomed to share the same fate. It's easy for politicians to accede to the demands of grieving and suffering victims' families, but that is not a good basis for creating law. Should people act out their fantasies there are plenty of laws in existence to prosecute them, we don't need new ones.
David Watson

If we all sit each day watching pretty flowers growing in the wind and ban all films, music, internet, books, radio and telephones there will still be a lunatic who goes out and kills half a village banning everything bad will not change this. There will always be killers and bad people out there, blaming technology will not raise the dead or stop future deaths - it is just a scapegoat as always. What is actually needed is care for those who are unstable and tougher penalties for those who kill.
Andrew Lindop

If this pornography depicts sexual activity between non-consenting adults then the offenders should be prosecuted in their own country. However, simply looking at images should never under any circumstances be considered a criminal offence. This all sounds to me like an Orwellian nightmare vision of mass police surveillance and sexual thought crime?.
Nick

I watched some pretty graphic scenes of mutilation and murder of women on BBC1's compelling "Messiah IV" last night. If I'd taped it does that mean I could go to jail for 3 years? These proposals are poorly thought out and another move towards creating a repressive politically-correct society.
Godfrey Bartlett

And this will be enforced how, exactly? Constant monitoring of every Internet connection? I think not. As the availability of firearms in this country has shown, banning things does not make those things inaccessible. The sickos will always find a way to get their hands on this material.
Stephen

Nobody has a problem with the fact that you are not allowed to publish, and as such access in the UK, this sort of imagery in print or on video so I can't see how anyone could have a complaint about accessing it through the internet. I for one will be happy to see the new laws brought in. While I am in full support of the proposed laws I can't help but feel that the justification is tenuous after all if this sort of imagery creates a 'monkey see monkey do effect' why is it not exactly the same with violent Hollywood films?
Richie

Another law to enforce? The police have enough trouble enforcing the current ones, only to see all of their hard work go to waste as judges hand out ridiculously lenient sentences. The government needs to stop this current trend of throwing new laws at every new problem that arises and concentrate on catching those that commit crime and ensuring that they are suitably punished. Watching a recent Crimewatch 'solved' and seeing violent offender after violent offender being given sentences of between 4 and 6 years is truly sickening.
Andy B

From the BBC

Accessing extreme (including consensual or staged) adult pornography over the internet could become illegal under proposed new legislation. Offenders could face up to three years in jail - but how difficult would it be to enforce such legislation?

The police have broadly welcomed the new proposals saying currently opportunities for prosecution only exist when links to such sites are found in this country.

Shameful Dave Johnston, police (ACPO) spokesman on sexual crime, said: We are not trying to criminalise more people, BUT... we are trying to reduce the supply and demand.

He accepts there will be a hardcore of people who will continue to pursue their supposedly "depraved" (ie people like you or I watching the likes of Baise-Moi) activities but said the police had the resources to pursue them through covert and overt actions.

But the Police Federation of England and Wales, while supporting the legislation, has voiced concern about how it will be enforced.  Vice chairman Alan Gordon said: This legislation would entail sites being constantly monitored in the same way paedophile sites are. There is a question mark over what the police service on its own is resourced to do. He said the law needed to be clear in its terminology to avoid legal arguments over the definition of violent pornography.

Concern has also been raised over whether people will just find new ways to avoid prosecution. Kim Gilmour, senior researcher for the magazine Computing Which?, said: You need to address how this material comes to be online in the first place. She said there were many ways in which people could "cover their tracks." They borrow techniques from hackers, using file-sharing software and exchanging information through using codewords and encryption. There are always going to be people who can circumvent the legislation but it might deter a few people.

Internet Watch, the net watchdog which runs a UK hotline for reporting illegal content, works with service providers (ISPs), the government and police to have such material removed. Spokeswoman Fay Macdonald said: So many of these sites are hosted outside the UK which has made the police investigation so difficult. Adult pornography is difficult to govern because of factors such as the global nature of the internet and the range of legislation and attitudes.

She said any new legislation would be challenging. Will there be levels of categorising material as there is with child abuse?, she said.

But not everyone is convinced new legislation would be a positive development.  Dr Chris Evans, founder of the group Internet Freedom, said: It will be easier to find people you wish to prosecute. But the idea that it might prevent violent sexual acts is without basis.

No definite link has been established between access to these sites and violence but the consultation document states it believes such material may encourage or reinforce interest in violent sexual activity.

Dr Evans said: Most people find this material repulsive. They don't need the government, police, or Internet Watch to tell them. People should be able to make up their own mind.

A refreshing change from the nutter hysteria in the US

From Joystiq

David Yesterday I spoke with BBFC examiner Jim Cliff at the BBFC stall at Games Market Europe. I asked Jim some questions on the subject of how games are rated, the Hot Coffee scandal and the 18 rating.

Joystiq: First of all, what is the BBFC’s attitude to user added game content with regard to the rating of games in terms of mods?

BBFC: Well, it doesn’t really come under what we do which is rating games under the video games recording act, which specifies that the physical supplier’s work is classified.

Joystiq: With regard to the Hot Coffee mod, am I right in saying that the BBFC did not increase the rating despite the widespread condemnation of the content in America?

BBFC: Yes, we did not increase the rating beyond 18. The situation is that if that happens in the original game then we will take it into account in our rating, but if it’s added later then there’s really nothing we can do about it.

Joystiq: What would your advice be to the US based games classifications board, in particular the ESRB when addressing sexual content in games?

BBFC: We have different ways of rating lots of things in comparison with lots of countries, for instance in France the film American Beauty recieved the equivalent of a Universal rating whereas in the UK we rated the film 18. We deal with media in different ways because our society is different. And in America, consumers have a reaction to content that we don’t have here. A lot of the British that saw [The Hot Coffee] episode said It’s not that big a deal, it’s not that explicit.

By David Wilson who is professor of criminology at the University of Central England in Birmingham, and the author of Innocence Betrayed: Paedophiles, the Media and Society

From The Guardian

We live in a quick-fix society that believes there is a ready-made, usually legal, remedy to each and every problem that we face. Why bother dealing with the structural, underlying problems that make young people drink to excess, get excluded from school or take drugs, when we can simply impose an Asbo on them?
And now we have proposals for a new law banning possession of violent and abusive pornography that is accessed via the internet, as if such a law - at the click of a mouse - will end the demand that has created this electronic supply. All that this does, as with Asbos, is create a semblance that something is being done to counter a real issue, without actually tackling the social, economic and cultural circumstances that render women and children powerless and make them pornographic fodder.

These structural arguments notwithstanding, there are three other issues that we should be concerned with before passing any proposed legislation.

Firstly, much of yesterday's debate centred on the murder two years ago of Jane Longhurst by a friend's boyfriend, who had seemingly spent hours viewing images of women being strangled and raped. The argument here - presented as "common sense" - seems based on the idea that viewing violent images produces violent acts. However, there is now 60 years' worth of research that suggests this simply isn't the case.

An offshoot of this research has more recently tried to establish a relationship between viewing child pornography and thereafter abusing children. Here the best we can do is to suggest that one in three "lookers" is a "doer", but we have yet to unravel the complex relationships between images, fantasy and action, and, crucially, which comes first.

This whole issue of the relationship between looking and doing is an important one, for it goes to the heart of the supposed benefits of the proposed legislation, which implies a direct causation. Yet we know that the relationship between thinking, viewing and acting on that thinking is multifaceted and complex, and not at all as clear-cut and simple as has been presented.

Look, for example, at motivation - in other words, where does the motivation to consume violent and pornographic images come from, and, crucially, is that motivation created by looking at violent and pornographic images, or does it already exist?

Our own personal knowledge of this area is perhaps a guide here, for all of us at some time have encountered violent, abusive or pornographic images - for myself most recently in Michael Winterbottom's widely available film 9 Songs - but overwhelmingly we do not act on those images; indeed, we are usually repulsed by them.

The small number who are not repulsed will continue to be motivated by a desire to consume these images, whether they are banned or not, and the idea of simply removing one source of the supply of those images is but a drop in the ocean in terms of a suitable response to violent pornography.

This raises a second issue about the regulation of private space - what we do in our bedrooms, studies and, ultimately, in our heads. Is what we view not a matter for ourselves and our consciences, rather than a suitable case for state intervention? This might paint a needlessly frightening scenario of Big Brother's thought police, but we have to remember that, increasingly, what has previously been deemed as private has become public and a suitable venue for state action. Look, for example, at the introduction of parental responsibility orders, which suggests that there is a "right" way to bring up our children, that can be taught at evening classes. Again, look at the quick fix - an evening class, rather than support and financial aid.

Finally, the reality of the law is that it is always playing "catch up". Put simply, the state has never been able to keep up with the drive and innovation of technology; when, for example, bans were introduced about downloading child pornography, most of the paedophiles I was researching had in any event moved to downloading through peer-to-peer systems and net-enabled mobile phones. In other words, the solutions to child pornography were not to find a quick fix to the supply, but to uncover, expose and overcome those structural strains in our society that fetishised young people's bodies and turned them into a sexual commodity, rather than to continue to prosecute priests, policemen, rock stars, teachers and the rest through Operation Ore.

So too the solutions to violent and abusive pornography will come when we deal with those issues which create the demand for abusive and violent images of women and children rather than focusing on how this demand is supplied.

Letter to the Home Office from Shaun

On the BBC web site  (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4151862.stm) it states: Liz Longhurst, of Reading, Berkshire, was shocked such material was freely available and the new laws may make viewing such images from the UK could now be made an offence.

Why is it, that when anything nasty happens in this country, you try to find something to blame ? Such as internet content ?

The fellow that caused the harm to Ms Longhurst was obviously mentally deranged. Given that as far as we know, only HE did something like this, after viewing certain images on the internet, rather than EVERYONE or a WORRYING PROPORTION of people who viewed such material, means that the fault was >>inside him<<, not because of the material he watched, however distasteful it may have been.

Censoring CHILD PORNOGRAPHY is one thing, (because the case for it is unequivocally proven) but censoring adult material, however distasteful is quite another, especially that which can be faked, like I suspect, the VAST MAJORITY of the material under discussion actually is. As such you are CENSORING free expression, and your activities would be DISPROPORTIONATE. As such I would NEVER support it.

Censorship of this kind should have NO PLACE in a free country, where the government is supposed to care about the Human Rights of its citizens. You will be undermining the support for minimal censorship, of child abuse, etc. If we are to have WHOLESALE censorship of this kind, well, I am sorry to have to tell you, that I'd sooner have NO CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET AT ALL, rather than this.

You have to respect HUMAN RIGHTS. It seems that you never do. Indeed I believe the OBSCENE PUBLICATIONS ACT itself, is a GROSS VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS..

You should be ashamed to even consider increased censorship of a free people, by pandering to the "something must be done(TM) brigade, after one isolated incident, regardless of how nasty it was.

IF YOU CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO CENSOR FAIRLY, THEN YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO CENSOR AT ALL.

Indeed that is required of you, by the Human Rights Act, which provides for a guarantee of FREE EXPRESSION. You people brought it in remember ?

By using censorship, you are simply using scapegoatism, and avoiding the real issues. Intelligent, well informed people can easily see that, and you are FAILING us.

WE are NOT STUPID, you know. It insults us, that you seem to believe otherwise.

Thought of the Day:

From the Governments nasty consultation paper

The offence would be limited to explicit actual scenes or realistic depictions of the specified types of material. By “explicit” we intend the offence to cover activity which can be clearly seen and is not hidden, disguised or implied. The intention is also only to cover actual images or realistic depictions of the activities listed (but not, for example, text or cartoons). By realistic depictions we intend to capture those scenes which appear to be real and are convincing, but which may be acted. This follows the precedent of the child pornography legislation and is in part necessary to avoid the need to prove the activity actually took place, as this would be an insuperable hurdle for the prosecution, particularly if the material comes from abroad.

It starts on a misleadingly reasonable notion that it is targeting scenes featuring grievous bodily harm. It then quickly says that it may be hard to prove the actual harm and so it will now criminalise the depiction of grievous bodily harm. This effectively puts an awful lot of modern horror films in the illegal category. You can't get much more grievous than a grizzly murder. The example of level of realism is hardly comforting. To be sure of not being realistic the Government suggests that it should be text or a cartoon.

So as soon as a horror film has a few sexy softcore scenes in it, it can be classed as a sex work and enable the police to knock down your door at 6am and bang you up for 3 years.

Editorial from the Financial Times

Most people find violent and abusive pornography offensive, and the availability of such images has been vastly increased by the internet. This has led to demands for government intervention, which resulted yesterday in proposals for a new British law to ban the possession of "extreme pornographic material". However, the difficulties in drafting such legislation are enormous - and the need for it is unproved.

The proposed British law would cover pornography depicting bestiality, necrophilia, serious violence in a sexual context and serious sexual violence. Publishing and distributing such images is already an offence in Britain, but internet users can acquire them from websites outside the UK. The government says making possession an offence would discourage the use of material that is "abhorrent to most people and has no place in our society".

The model is the legislation that criminalises possession of indecent photographs of children. Yet the parallels are not exact. First, there is a clear victim with child pornography, whose protection justifies a law to choke off demand. Second, there is a clear definition of what constitutes such pornography that has allowed internet service providers to close illegal websites and block those based abroad.

The government's consultation paper struggles to make the case that extreme pornography causes sufficient harm to justify criminalising it. It says the police believe that in some cases, the material may involve criminal injury to those involved in making it. If so, this is a matter for the police in the country where it takes place.

The government also says it is possible that the images encourage violent and aberrant sexual activity. It cites the brutal murder in 2003 of a young woman by a man who had looked at extreme websites. Yet it admits it cannot draw definite conclusions from research about the impact of pornography on individuals, even those predisposed to violent sexual behaviour.

The practicalities of a new law are daunting. Defining the offence would raise considerable problems: what, for example, is "serious violence"? Attempts to define obscene publications in the past have brought ridicule on the law, banning books subsequently recognised as classics.

There would have to be exemptions for those who inadvertently stumble on extreme images or are sent them in spam e-mail. Pornographers would also be able to display images that counted as news coverage, medical images, educational material or works of art.

The proposed new law is an attempt to close a loophole opened up by the internet in Britain's already stringent censorship regime. As the consultation paper admits, no other western country attempts to prohibit simple possession of extreme pornography. There are much greater threats to the lives and wellbeing of the public that governments should focus their attention on.

From a press release by the Internet Watch Foundation

Under the Government's proposals, it would be an offence to possess images depicting scenes of serious sexual violence and other obscene material. Currently, The Obscene Publications Act (OPA) 1959, makes it an offence only to publish this material.

Independent body; the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is the only organisation in the UK to provide an internet ‘hotline’ service for the public to report their exposure to illegal content on the net, specifically; child abuse images hosted anywhere in the world; criminally obscene content hosted in the UK and criminally racist content hosted in the UK.

Whereas the law on child abuse images is very clear, providing specific guidelines on what constitutes an offence and how this type of material is categorised, there are many factors which have made the governance of ‘adult’ pornographic content extremely difficult. These include; the global nature of the internet, the difficulty in regulating and controlling access to content, the range of legislation across the world and the increasing diversity in social attitudes.

The IWF deals very specifically with illegal content and is not involved in making moral judgements on web content. Material is assessed based on whether it is a breach of the law in the UK, according to relevant legislation. This enables a very clear line on what is and is not ‘actionable’ and what may or may not warrant potential police investigation.

It is already rare to find this type of extreme pornographic content hosted in the UK, due to the success of a partnership approach between the various parties to minimise the availability of such content.

The fact that many such sites are hosted outside the UK have made police investigations very difficult and it is hoped that the creation of new offences will assist in this process.

During the first 6 months of 2005 the IWF received 1074 reports categorised as 'potentially obscene adult material'.

This was 9% of all reports submitted to the IWF hotline in this period.

81% appeared to be hosted in the US, 5% in China, 5% in Russia and 9% in other countries.

Of those 1074 reports, 140 or 13% were assessed by the IWF hotline team to contain material that would potentially breach the Obscene Publications Act.

53% of those reports related to acts of extreme sexual torture.

Of the 140 reports, 60% appeared to be hosted in the US, 14% in China, 4% in Russia and 22% in 'other' countries.

No potentially illegal material appeared to be hosted or domain registered in the UK.

Peter Robbins, CEO, IWF said: The UK has an excellent partnership model for dealing with potentially illegal content. The IWF will actively contribute in the consultation phase to achieve clarity in the new laws and to ensure appropriate partnerships are in place for the content that fails the test to be removed and where possible the individuals responsible investigated.

The IWF will study the Governments proposals very carefully and will respond to the consultation paper after taking account of the views of our many stakeholders.

Media Contacts

IWF
Fay MacDonald
Communications Co-ordinator
01223 237 700

Home Office
Brendan O'Grady
Home Office Press Office
020 7035 3850
Newsdesk for media enquiries: 020 7035 4381

Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA UK)
Brian Ahearne
Communications Manager
020 7233 7239
ISPA UK: 0870 0500 710

"Dukhtaran-e-Millat has also campaigned for women to veil themselves fully and sprayed paint over those who refused to cover up". 

Worthy of hatred or what?

Based on an article from The Guardian

Nutters wearing burkas in Indian Kashmir have raided brothels, smashed wine bottles and chastised canoodling teenagers in internet cafes to "arrest moral degradation".

The women, all members of Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the People), a separatist group, began their fight this week to impose a puritanical set of Islamic values on Kashmir.

Aasiya Andrabi, the head of the group whose husband is in jail for allegedly fighting the Indian army, announced the formation of all-women squads to raid brothels in the Muslim-majority state. We will expose those indulging in immoral activities, said Andrabi, who revels in her role as a radical Islamist and has previously voiced support for Osama bin Laden.

The campaign by Dukhtaran-e-Millat has focused on prostitution. The women have set up a telephone number for people to call when a man or woman has entered some place to commit adultery. Adultery is illegal in Kashmir and can result in imprisonment. The women, travelling in three-wheel auto-rickshaws and cars, were staging the raids wearing head-to-toe veils.

Andrabi said her group's members had also swooped on eateries and internet cafes where they found teenage boys and girls talking freely and huddled in booths "being intimate". The group, which upbraided the young people, said they would talk to their parents.

Dukhtaran-e-Millat has also campaigned for women to veil themselves fully and sprayed paint over those who refused to cover up. The drive has been unsuccessful in the region in which a more liberal form of Islam has prevailed.

Alcohol shops, bars and cinemas were closed in the Kashmir valley in 1989 after an outbreak of separatist violence. But since the peace process between India and Pakistan, many venues have quietly reopened.

Yesterday separatist groups agreed to meet the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, for talks.

From New Kerala

The Tamil film New continues to be mired in problems over charges of obscenity that have caused a sensation in the Tamil film industry.

Actor-director S.J. Suryah and his film earned some respite from the Supreme Court that Tuesday stayed a Madras High Court order to revoke the censor board approval for the film.

But the outcome of the case is being eagerly awaited by an industry that has often toed the thin line between art and obscenity on celluloid.

Released in July 2004, the film was a hit with campus audiences of both sexes.

Women's groups here protested against the film and the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) took the matter to the high court demanding that the Central Board of Film Certification clearance to the movie be revoked.

The high court agreed. On Aug 5, it directed the board to revoke certification for New after expressing concern over "vulgarity" in the film about an eight-year-old boy who in his dreams at night is transformed into a 28-year-old young man.

Suryah was arrested last week for misbehaving with a woman official of the censor board and released on bail. He was accused of throwing a mobile phone at Vanathy Srinivasan after she refused to allow an objectionable song in his film. Srinivasan lodged a police complaint and a court issued a non-bailable warrant against the director. Suryah has been asked by the court to appear before the police daily at 10 a.m. until the next hearing on Sep 6.

In the Supreme Court, the petitioners contended that the film was in the realm of fantasy and should not be construed as obscene.

The apex court, staying the high court order of Aug 5, said the board certification could not be revoked. At best, the high court could order deletion of certain objectionable portions, he said.

The next hearing on the case in the Supreme Court is set for Sep 5.