Very brief recap - It is 2011. ISPs have abandoned their original "black box" Cleanfeed anti child-porn implementations for more flexible and less error-prone ones. The BBFC wants to get a slice of this whole internet thing. The IWF are keen to help. Copyright holders have lost their main weapon against P2P file sharing. Mobile internet is expanding as fast as broadband had 10 years ago but crucially already have mandatory porn filtering in place. And David Cameron and Theresa May want to appear Tough And Decisive In Protecting Our Children.
Downloading Transformers 3 - morally equivalent to downloading child pornography
So, the copyright holders are locked out from "suing" the people downloading their stuff, so have to return to attacking the centralised points. Once again it's Usenet that caused all the trouble. Copyright trolling had revived Usenet to a massive extent, and Usenet remained basically untouchable legally for fairly dull technical and legal reasons. However the new generation of uploaders wanted paying for their "work" - adware and banners on their trackers helped somewhat, but neither of those were available on Usenet. Also Usenet was huge - 10TB of data a day, spread over 100k newsgroups. Inspired by BT trackers, uploaders started to organise their posts and make indexed, searchable lists of them. One of these sites - the British based (
still leading the way in some things) newzbin.com, became the market leader, and their file format (.nzb) is now more or less an industry standard.The copyright holders sued the site owner, who was - charitably - a fucking idiot. He tried the usual smart-arse "Well your honour all I do is index things". The judge pointed out that indexing unlawful things was probably unlawful. "Well who's to say they're unlawful? I only let people choose to search for keywords like "Screener" and "pre-release" because those are words people are interested in". Judges are second only to bouncers in their capacity to be unimpressed by people thinking they're too clever for them, and he failed miserably. However, the judge was apparently just as annoyed by the copyright holders outrageous damages claims, because he awarded them only the amount that the site had made off it's index, not the millions they claimed they were owed.
Newzbin.com was shuttered though, but with the low animal cunning of the hardened criminal, newzbin2.com opened up a week later. This time however it was hosted in the Seychelles, whose courts were rather more receptive to the new owners claims of "It's just an index, bro!" and ruled the site could stay up.
Around the same time as this, the IWF blocking systems were much in the news after another Wikipedia cockup (short version - no, Wikipedia was not blocked, but it's not worth arguing the technicalities). The Big 4 had, until that point, not really acknowledged the abandonment of the Cleanfeed architecture, but a lot of people realised, with the speed with which the problem was resolved compared to previous blocking misfires, that this must have happened and the ISPs now could edit their block lists.
The rights holders pounced on this. 20th Century Fox applied for an injunction (citing, once again, our old friend Godfrey v Demon) saying that the newzbin2 site, having been ruled unlawful in the UK, must be blocked by BT, or BT would be jointly liable for Fox's (and the other rights holders) losses. BT, as they had in all previous such cases, said that Cleanfeed could only be used to block child abuse images as defined by the IWF list, and they could not make changes to the list. Fox however were able to use the speed of the resolution of the Wikipedia misfire (and chatter from BT staff on Wikipedia and other sites) proving that BT could indeed edit their block lists. BT folded.
Okay, time for some
. Legal experts remain to this day remain baffled about why BT relied on a defence they knew to be erroneous, and didn't attempt any other defences - proportionality for a start, and also that by using it to block things rather less serious than child pornography would encourage people to bypass Cleanfeed and make it well-known just how easy that was to do (and man, it's stupidly easy. No, I'm not telling you how.) My own, entirely personal and completely unfounded, belief is that someone in BT realised that since the launch of BT Vision (now BT TV) they had a lot more to lose from copyright infringment than once they did. Unilateral filtering of filesharing would be a PR nightmare and lose them thousands of customers. Filtering by court order - and knowing that with that precedent the rights holders would also apply to other ISPs to have blocks put in place - meant that they could have their cake and eat it. They could reduce the amount of filesharing on their network without losing customers or face. Like I say, purely my own opinion, but all four of the big UK fixed-line broadband providers have VoD services of their own and none of them have attempted to overturn the orders. Just saying.Surprisingly the rights holders also haven't gone mad with this new-found power. Exact numbers are hard to come by but it's believed it's less than 50 sites have been blocked this way. (I do actually know the exact number for one company and it's a lot less than 50 but I'm not really allowed to say more than that), and it's about 70/30 between BT trackers and Usenet indices. Surprisingly quite a few of the usual suspects have *not* been blocked, maybe because they don't charge membership fees. This is probably why the holders have used these powers so sparingly, they don't want to risk the ISPs fighting back if the holders attempt to block any site that doesn't match the fairly specific description of Newsbin's model.
Extreme porn? What, like bungie jumping?
Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 fulfills the fairly well-known phenomenon in law where if a piece of legislation is rushed through in response to a single tragic event it will be shitty law. If that law is known by a victim's name it's going to be really, really fucking shitty. "Jane's Law", tacked onto a law that was already shitty in the way late New Labour-era criminal law tended to be, banned possession of "extreme, obscene images". It's a really stupid law, because if interpreted narrowly it doesn't actually ban anything not already banned by several other laws, but interpreted broadly bans every horror film ever made. It also singularly fails to actually protect against the one thing that it was rushed through for. I won't dwell on the details of Jane Longhurst's death, because they're thoroughly unpleasant no matter whose account you believe, but no evidence was presented at trial that Graham Coutt's liking for sadomasochistic porn was the cause of her death.Because it bans possession though, it would seem to be off-topic for these rambling posts about censorship and the internet, but the committee hearings for the then CJIB made chilling viewing for anyone involved in the internet.
Jim "Twat" Gamble of the Child Expoitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP, at the time an independent police agency, now part of the NCA) rocked up. Now you may be asking why the head of a police agency charged with protecting children was even there, but you're missing the entire point of Jim Gamble's career, which is to make Jim Gamble Lord High Inquistor of the internet. (CEOP themselves do excellent work and I won't hear a word against them, but fuck me Jim Gamble is a twat. You know how whenever George Galloway opens his mouth and says something you'd normally agree with, you wonder if maybe the Tories are on to something? Imagine if George Galloway had a twin brother who'd become a police officer.)
Jim bought some friends. These friends had a great idea. These friends were from the IWF, and explained how the kind of pornography they were talking about was already illegal to import into the UK, or to sell, make or transfer within the UK. Making possession illegal was pointless, they said, because there was no way at all of detecting it. The IWF though, they could run a list, similar to the CAI list, for "extreme pornography". If ISPs were forced to filter on this list (and of course pay the IWF to compile it) then all the bad things would never happen ever again.
Astonishingly even the Home Affairs Committee, who normally can be relied upon to think of David Blunkett as a pinko wuss, thought this was a step too far, and Jim, his friends, and the separate cargo container that Jim uses to keep his ego in, were quietly shown the door. The IWF did actually compile this list (it has about 20 commercial BDSM sites and a couple of more mainstream ones, and a bunch of Tumblrs and DeviantArt sites, on it) and sell it to the commercial filtering companies who will return in the next part of our story.
Sorry, this website is naughtier than running through a wheat field
Now let's talk about The Great Firewall. David Cameron and the concern lines on his neck were worried. The attempted takeover of Sky by 20th Century Fox put him between the Rubert Murdoch's wrinkly old rock and Paul Dacre's hard place. He needed a bone to throw the latter. Fortunately a fairly obscure manifesto commitment to help "protect the innocence of children" (and wow those words out of a Tory mouth sound sinister) gave him such an opportunity. In 2010, to fulfill that commitment, noted fuckwit Michael Gove had commissioned a review, called "Let children be children" into the sexualisation of children (yeesh, I'm going to need three showers after typing that and "Gove" in the same sentence). The recommendations of the review were not particularly controversial - no sexually-charged advertising before the watershed or near schools, standardising codes of practice for marketing to children, that sort of thing.Ex-PR man Cameron was having none of that, of course. Advertising couldn't possibly be the problem. Instead he seized on one recommendation buried towards the end - that UK.Gov should standardise web rating methodologies and availability to allow universality of filtering across mobile, fixed-line, and wireless internet access. That sounded far too much Big Government Regulation though, which was of course Evil. No problem though - someone at the Daily Mail, who'd probably been irritated at having to pay a quid on a credit card to get to PornHub on their mobile - had finally noticed that there was a universal, opt-out porn filter on all of the large mobile providers. FILTH ON THE INTERNET was front page news once again, and Cameron slimed into action.
Something Would Be Done, he said. ISPs would be forced to filter porn out, and customers would have to opt out of the filter, just as they did on mobile. From the outside, this looked like another Cleanfeed-style fait accompli - "Do this voluntarily or we'll force you to do it" - but there's a really dirty little secret here. The idea didn't come from Cameron, or Gove, or any of the other slightly-glistening intellectual heavyweights of the New Right. No, the idea came from the ISPs themselves. You see the internet had pretty much reached 100% penetration (fnarr) by 2010, at least of households that big telcos could make money off of. One group though remained unpenetrated (yeah okay I'm doing it deliberately now), middle-class parents of young children. All of the big four offered some form of filtering but it was entirely client-side, and therefore basically pointless against any child old enough to reach the keyboard. Network-side filtering though was actually effective, and could be sold by the ISPs to these parents so little Jocasta could search for pictures of ponies without ever discovering Mr. Hands.
However, just as with Fox v BT, there was a massive first-mover trap. The dirty little not-a-secret-at-all of the internet is that everyone accesses porn. Literally, everyone. Trust me on this. Whoever was first to launch an opt-out porn filter would lose far more customers too embarrassed to tick the "Please bring the naked people back" box than they would gain from the people who would soon be flooding on to Mumsnet to explain how the entire world had to change so they didn't have to actually do any kind of parenting. All of the ISPs point fingers at all the other about who approached the government first about this, but someone certainly did. Cameron being Cameron he made it opt-out so he could be seen to be cracking the whip but really he was actually doing a fairly good PR job for the ISPs.
FACESITTING IS STILL LEGAL IN THE UK STOP SAYING IT ISN'T YOU UTTER FUCKING IDIOTS
This is probably the thing most people actually think of when talking about internet censorship in the UK (apart from the new dumbness that kicked off this magnum opus). Cast your mind back to our friend Ben Dover and his conviction for selling R18 videos via mail order, and the various court cases between Harmony and various authorities in the UK over whether or not internet sales of porn constituted mail order. They had mostly settled down by the early 2010s - the completely inflexible interpretation of the Video Recordings Act, as well as the long-established precedent that selling purely digital goods constituted mail order, had led all of the UK-based porn producers to set up offshore.Yet another brief aside - UK porn production is actually a fairly booming field. Nowhere near as big as the US or the other countries surrounding the North Sea but an awful lot of specialist porn, especially BDSM, is shot here, because of the ease of finding performers. When the French call spanking "The English vice" they're not joking. The modern genre of "gonzo porn" was also invented here - by our old friend Ben Dover - but for some reason it wasn't celebrated in the Olympic opening ceremonies alongside the NHS and James Bond.
If there's one recurring theme in these posts (that isn't terrible double entendres) it's how fucking stupid the massively overlapping and often contradictory web of laws that cover just about anything to do with the internet in this country is. If there's another recurring theme - and this is one that covers most of my effortposts in various incarnations of this thread - it's that every time there's an attempt to fix one or more of these problems it's instantly picked up by utter fucking idiots who pick out a couple of scary paragraphs and scream as loudly as they can about how evil they are, even if the pargraphs mean the exact opposite of what is claimed. This isn't purely an internet phenomenon, it's one that afflicts journalists and even senior members of junior coaliton partners in Her Majesty's Government.
The Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 should probably be studied as an example of how this sort of thing happens. Following a couple of other amendments to the Communications Act 2003 (designed to allow the use of simulcast IP video alongside, or instead of, broadcast) an ambiguity in the Video Recordings Act was opened up. Basically up until that point all law had seen online purchases of any digital media as more or less exactly equivalent to purchases of physical media, but these new regulations drew a distinction between "as-live" streams, time-shifted streams, on-demand streams, and downloads.
Given that since the end of the Harmony cases the vast majority of online video (not just porn) had switched from downloads to on-demand streams this meant that either someone would have to suck it and see by offering R18 streams from a UK host and see if they got prosecuted, or the Home Office and DCMS could just clarify the law. Given nobody in particular wanted to roll those dice, but that UK companies *did* want to sell video porn online, the government decided to take the latter course to remove doubt. They took what was more or less the path of legislative least resistance by amending the Communications Act to bring streamed porn in line with other streamed media but this, crucially, meant that UK providers could, for the very first time, sell R18-rated material over the internet, as long as they had an age verification system in place.
This needs to be reiterated - this was the biggest liberalisation of UK pornography law since 1983. It was still utterly shit, of course, but it did finally mean that porn could be streamed by UK companies from UK hosts without the extraterritorial shell game they'd had to use until that point. The reason it was still utterly shit was that the material still needed to be R18-rated, and the BBFC no doubt hoped that they would be able to start getting a piece of the action from the various companies that had gone online-only over the years.
Of course a lot of these companies were still unhappy with this, and with good reason - it still meant that the exact same data, sent to the exact same place in the UK, would be illegal if sent from within the UK but legal if sent from absolutely anywhere else. The problem is that obscenity legislation just isn't sexy enough to get in the press. However, internet censorship was a pretty hot button to press, so they (through the law firm that had represented Harmony in it's various cases) put out a press release. Unfortunately (and ironically) the original release has long gone down the memory hole, but the headline was "UK Government restricts internet porn" - the exact opposite of what had happened, of course, but that wasn't even their worst offence. They then went on to "explain" that UK internet porn would have to abide by the R18 restrictions. Well yes, again, technically true. They then went into the idiosyncrasies of the R18 certificate, something they had also been fighting against.
Taking the piss, but not in the face
Now I do have to acknowledge that the R18 certificate is a bit peculiar, and reflects the ghosts of moral panics past plus a few individual bugbears of BBFC members past. So the general precepts are pretty sound - no depictions (pretend or otherwise) of activities involving underage participants or a lack of consent, or acts likely to cause serious harm. There are arguments to be had around that last one I suppose, lots of people are perfectly happy (in sexual and non-sexual contexts) to do things likely to cause them serious harm, but it's at least understandable.What's rather less understandable is the particular details of the interpretation. Coprophilia and urolgia are both banned theoretically because they are likely to cause serious harm (please let's not have that argument) but actually, allegedly, because various members of the BBFC just didn't want to watch anything involving peepee and poopoo so just blanket-banned them. Female ejaculation (and really let's not have that argument here) is banned because it was impossible for them to tell the difference between ejaculate and urine. Other kinks are likewise outright banned on pretty tenuous reasons.
Paper Buzzfeed (otherwise known as The Independent) picked up this story and ran well beyond even the extremely tenuous statements in the press release, claiming with literally no backing that all of these acts were now banned from porn *shot* in the UK. This is utterly untrue and trivially provable as so, because porn containing all of the above has been merrily shot in the UK for pretty much as long as there's been porn. In fact until the Sexual Offences Act 2003 there was literally no restriction on pornography production in the UK that didn't also restrict what you could get up to without a camera pointing at you. Even now the only restriction is that participants must be over 18 even though the age of consent is 16. That's it. That's the only restriction on porn shot in the UK.
The internet, of course, then did it's thing. All of a sudden it was now illegal to have sex in the UK other than with the lights off for procreation purposes. This is now the Absolute Truth as far as the majority of the internet is concerned. This led to some (admittedly very entertaining) protests outside Parliament, and a legion of idiots claiming victory when some poor harassed press person at the DCMS explained for the 97th time that you were still perfectly free to piss on anyone who wanted to be pissed on by you, even with a camera in the room.
The unhappy ending
This more or less brings us up to the present day. If you've been paying attention to all of the above the arguments over the new Digital Economy Act suddenly make sense. It's more or less a direct repeat of the consultation over DEA2010 - the BBFC want to get in on the entire internet porn thing (they offer an online-only certification process which has been taken up precisely zero times). The Daily Mail want to scare everyone about all the porn on the internet (in stories with scantily-clad children in the Sidebar Of Shame right next to them). HMG wants to be seen to be Protecting Are Children. The rights holders want to stop anyone from even being aware of the existence of the internet. And the ISPs sort of agree with all of the above because it makes their lives easier, especially if they can blame the Big Bad Government.The worst of the current proposals are that the current porn filtering at the Big 4 should be extended to exclude all non-R18-rated porn and all porn that doesn't have an age-verification step, and that the rights holders should be able to have a non-judicial route to ban access to copyright-infringing sites.
I really don't want to predict what will actually shake out of the next few months and years, because well look where everything else in UK politics is right now and try to imagine what kind of drugs you'd have had to be on to predict them in 2015. However right now at least I don't believe either of those two are likely to happen. But... I wouldn't rule out a "voluntary" extension of the porn filtering to have a separate "I want to access all of the illegal porn please" box to tick, and I really wouldn't be surprised if the telcos (who, like I say, all now make money off their own VoD services) agreed to a more comprehensive blocking scheme for copyright infringing sites, but one that's run as more of a partnership than the rights holders rather than an imposition.
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