A recent change to UK law has banned activities such as female ejaculation and face-sitting, amongst other things, when filmed and sold by porn producers in the UK. It does not ban male ejaculation. The law was not discussed in parliament, meaning it was passed undemocratically.
In April I had a meeting in Windsor with ATVOD, the Authority for TV on Demand. They enforce the new anti-porn laws which sex worker Charlotte Rose and I created a Care2 petition against. I work for Care2 as a Campaigner.
It was an interesting meeting and I learned quite a bit. I also recorded the meeting.
It seems that the real issue lies with how the Obscenity Act is interpreted by the British Board of Film Classification. ATVOD take action against UK editors of on demand media which they believe does or would be rated as unclassified by BBFC, on the basis of how the BBFC interpret the Obscenity Act.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport was responsible for the change in the law – to apply the Obscenity Act to online media on-demand (it was already applied to DVDs). The problem isn’t really that the law now applies to online (because the same issues apply to limiting sexual freedoms when considering DVDs) – the problem is the list of acts deemed ‘obscene’ by the BBFC’s interpretation of the Obscenity Act.
The petition co-author, Charlotte Rose, is going to take this forward with BBFC but we’ve agreed that DCMS is not the right target for this petition in light of this information.
Interesting learnings from the meeting:
- – ATVOD will not comment on their opinion of the new anti-porn laws
- – ATVOD were consulted by DCMS on the wording of the new laws
- – ATVOD cover UK media on demand. Live streaming is not considered to be on-demand. The user must be able to choose when they view the content for it to be deemed on-demand. If it is not on-demand, video may be regulated by OFCOM instead. OFCOM delegate regulation of on-demand services to ATVOD. Media is considered to be ‘UK’ if the person/people making editorial decisions about its publication are based in the UK. So porn producers and actors based in the UK could have a content editor for their website based outside the UK and ATVOD would not regulate them.
- – Any UK on-demand media channels are supposed to register with ATVOD and pay them a fee.
- – On user-generated content platforms e.g. YouTube, Twitter, PornHub etc. the ‘editor’ responsible for the content is the person uploading content to their channel, i.e. the platform itself is not regulated by ATVOD but its users are, if they are deemed to be using it in a professional context.
- – When media is considered to be breaking the law, ATVOD will send an initial notice to the responsible party, and if within a number of days no response is received, a more detailed investigation will happen, and a second notice will be sent to the media editor. At that point they have ten days before action is taken. The action may be a fee that has to be paid as well as the content being removed. If they don’t remove the content, they will be reported to OFCOM, who can notify ISPs, who may refuse to host the illegal content.
- – ATVOD do not have targets of numbers of breaches of the law that they need to find.
Leave a Reply