CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘Obscenity’ Category

U.K. Mail-Order Operators Plead Guilty to Obscenity Charges: “A London court on Monday found two entrepreneurs of an adult DVD-catalog mail-order business guilty on obscenity charges.”

(Via XBIZ.com | News & Articles.)

Man remanded for extreme porn offences: “

Time to dust off those disk scrubbers?

An arrest – and remand time – for being suspected of possessing extreme porn may act as wake-up call for those who thought that the new law on extreme porn would just quietly fade away.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Government unbans dirty vids but bans ‘legal highs’: “

Thatcher’s legacy – dirty DVDs for all

Legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1984, which banned the sale of unclassified videos and computer games, is not actually enforceable because the government of the day never told the European Commission.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

UK obscenity law: Where to now?: “

Post-Girls (Scream) Aloud, the written word is safe – for now

Analysis As the dust settles on the Girls (Scream) Aloud trial, what are the implications for the future of obscenity law in the UK?…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Prosecutors drop ‘freedom threatening’ Girls Aloud obscenity blog case: “A blogger has been acquitted of obscenity offences in a court case that could have redefined UK citizens’ right to free speech on the internet. Prosecutors offered no evidence against the 35 year-old.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

Landmark case? No, not really. This was a prosecution which should have never taken place in the first place. Text based publications should not be the focus of any obscenity prosecution. [Yaman Akdeniz]

Girls Aloud net obscenity case falls at first hurdle: “

Prosecution offers no evidence

A landmark case, which could have led to draconian new restrictions on what UK authors may publish on the internet – and elsewhere – has been dismissed.…

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Prosecution counsel were due today to open their case against Civil Servant Darryn Walker, aged 35, of South Shields, who was accused of publishing an allegedly obscene story online. Instead, they stood up in Newcastle Crown Court this morning and informed the judge that they would be offering no evidence. A statement may follow.

The story in question was published around two years ago on Alt Sex Stories Text Repository, a US-based archive of erotica which currently hosts around 400,000 stories of every shape, size and interest. Entitled Girls (Scream) Aloud, it focussed on the rape, mutilation and murder of the popular group Girls Aloud for – presumably – purposes of sexual arousal.

The Daily Star reported it to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) on the grounds that it could be criminally obscene, and the IWF referred the case to the police. Walker was arrested and charged. His trial was originally set for March of this year, but was delayed as both he and the prosecuting authorities decided to escalate the stakes by briefing top-notch barristers – Queen’s Counsel – to put their arguments.

The significance of this result cannot be underestimated. In the UK, the last major prosecution of a purely written work was for Inside Linda Lovelace in 1976. Following the failure of the jury to condemn that work as obscene, the Met Police backed off from prosecutions of wholly written material, expressing the belief that when it came to literature, if that work was not obscene, “nothing was”.

Clearly, a successful prosecution would have overturned a 30-year presumption against prosecuting authors for purely written material, and potentially opened the floodgates to a spate of prosecutions against online authors.

That genie now appears well and truly back in the bottle – although the fallout from this case is likely to be much wider, and to have a number of quite important consequences for the law and how written material is policed in the UK.

In a statement to The Register this morning, a spokesman for the Met said: “It was felt that the content of the material and the fact that it made reference to a band popular with young people who may search on the internet for information about them made this case worthy of consideration for prosecution and officers worked closely with the CPS throughout every stage of the investigations.”
Bootnote

Had the case gone to trial, your correspondent was due to give evidence on precisely the point made by the Met: at the time that the case first broke, one issue that became immediately very clear was just how difficult it was to find the site by chance. “Girls Aloud” by itself returns over two million Google hits – and the term needs refining using a range of very non-innocent words before you stand any chance of finding this story.

In effect, the more famous the target of a story, the more people who may be looking for them – but also, the harder it is to find any given story about them. ®

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Extreme porn law used on beastly Chinese DVD pirates: “

Cops make grab for mysterious black bags

Five months on from the passage of new laws on extreme porn, police forces up and down the UK appear to be using them sparingly – and not quite in the way that parliament intended.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

British film board rejects ‘disturbing’ sexual torture film: “

Is Obscenity Law undermined by extreme porn?

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) have issued a rare rejection notice for a ‘disturbing and realistic’ DVD called NF713.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

How the government uses dirty data to legislate morality: “

So what’s a standard deviation?

When it comes to sex and censorship, Government’s insistence that laws are ‘evidence-based’ is little more than hot air.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Landmark Spamming, Obscenity Appeals Case Heats Up: “Appellants representing the first convictions in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for online obscenity not involving child pornography and the first convictions ever under the federal CAN-SPAM Act filed their joint reply brief Tuesday.”

(Via XBIZ.com | News & Articles.)