CyberLaw Blog

Archive for November 2nd, 2008

CBeebies actor is jailed for child pornography offences | Mail Online

By James Tapper, Last updated at 2:55 PM on 02nd November 2008″

An actor who appeared in a BBC children’s TV series has been jailed for 16 months for child pornography offences. Bernard Dorman pleaded guilty to inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and to taking indecent pictures of two girls.

Dorman, 75, was in three episodes of Brum in 2001 – four years after he was given community service for previous child pornography offences.

On October 19 this year, Warwick Crown Court was told police raided his Coventry home in March 2007 and found 15 indecent pictures of a 14-year-old girl. He also took 284 indecent pictures of a 17-year-old.

He was ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register and banned from working with children. Ragdoll Productions, which made the show for the BBC’s CBeebies channel, said no children appeared in the same scenes as Dorman. The BBC said it would not repeat the episodes in which he appeared.

Index on Censorship: ‘There are more people working on censoring the Internet than developing it’

Yigal Schleifer is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor

The successes of Harun Yahya show just how easy it is to shut down web discussion in Turkey, writes Yigal Schleifer

Turkish Internet users woke up on 24 October to find that access to Blogger, the popular blog-hosting site owned by Google, had been blocked by a court order, because of illegal material (streams of football games) found on a handful of blogs.

The ban on Blogger — provisionally lifted after five days — came without warning, but few were surprised by it. In the last two years, Turkey has become increasingly involved in controlling what its citizens can access online. So far in the last year, access to more than 850 websites has been blocked by the Turkish state, either through court order or government action. YouTube, the popular video sharing site, has been banned since last May, after amateurish clips mocking Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, were posted on it. WordPress, another major blog-hosting site, was blocked for more than a year and the website of Oxford evolutionist Richard Dawkins is currently off limits to Turkish Internet users.
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