Germany and 'that' ban

Thanks. But I can't see any references there to proposed legislation that might cover SL. References to developing codes of good practice for the industry and the like, certainly, but nothing resembling legislation. I did have a quick look to see if I could find anything about regulation, and the nearest I got was this, from The Register in Mayhttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/14/burnham_internet_regulation/

Since then, Andy Burnham has moved on to a new job, as Secretary of State for Health. The Home Secretary (who also has an interest in such matters, of course) at the time, Jaqui Smith, has resigned her post in the aftermath of the row over parliamentary expenses.

Yes, UK legislators -- like those in most other countries, I would guess -- express concerns about online content and children's access to it. But I'm not aware of any legislation that might affect SL that's in the pipeline -- not, I think, that there would now be time to get anything particularly contentious through Parliament this side of a general election.

This is not about the vulnerability of LL to criminal charges or lawsuits, it is about LL's business decision concerning the amount of revenue they receive from German players in SL, versus the changes needed to stop the German government banning them and keeping that revenue stream coming versus the number of Germans who would stay anyway if what they are into is removed.

Rock

I think this is the one Scylla was referring to.

http://www.engender.org.uk/UserFiles/File/Consultation%20Responses/090425%20Evidence%20re%20extreme%20porn.pdf

Second Life was mentioned in Section 2 on page 3.

Rock

No matter what happens, they'll find a loophole that lets them keep being perverted while following the letter of the law. Infact, tentacle porn exists today because of censorship. How is that for an interesting counterstroke? Gotta love when censorship causes the creation of even kinkier things.

Is there anything in the proposed law that would actually prevent Germans from downloading the viewer from LL's servers and playing it? Development and distribution are all that are mentioned. German content developers and registration APIs may get hosed, but I'm not sure the majority of German users will.

Yes, thanks Rock, that is indeed the reference I was making to pending Scottish legislation. The document in question is a submission, rather than part of the proposed legislation, but it makes my point.

For the UK generally, I wasn't referring to pending legislation, but rather new(ish) provisions in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act that came into effect in January of this year.

http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/docs/extreme-pornographic-images.pdf

No specific reference to SL here, but, there has been some agitation publicly in this regard. The new provisions, in combination with the work of the CCIS, the Internet Watch Foundation, and the ISP content blocker Cleanfeed, make the filtering of SL in the future a real possibility.

And of course I forgot to mention the recent brouhaha in Australia.

Thanks. But the fact that a particular pressure group mentions, in passing, SL in a reference to its view that removing an exclusion that was -- very sensibly -- specificially included in the equivalent, and highly contentous, English legislation doesn't really worry me. The document is just a written submission to the Parliament about what engender.org thinks the bill should include. Anyone can write and submit such a document and put it on their website. The test is whether it looks like getting near the statue book.

Indeed, it contains something that pretty much excludes SL -- one of the elements of the offense is that "a reasonable person looking at the image would think that the people and animals portrayed were real."

You may be right. Although the contentious issue of "photorealistic skins" and such like, not to mention the employment of photographic porn in SL suggests that this may be open to interpretation.

I apologize if I gave the impression that SL in the UK was in immediate danger. What I was trying to suggest is that the Mark Kirk episode, the recent fuss in Australia, legislation pending or passed in the UK, the largely successful Equality Now campaign, and this new German thing, taken together suggest that depictions of "extreme porn" in SL are likely to become more, and not less, of a political issue in the future.

I'll freely admit that I am being speculative. But there are some ominous signs out there.

How nice to see the governments of the top countries of the world have no other problems to solve and they have nothing better to do than wasting the time and the citizen's money in these "priority" problems.

What a wonderful world we have!

BTW, German authorities are just banning too much... they should take care with that banning compulsion... or the world will end banning Germany.

Well the US made it an offence for European online gaming companies from accepting CC payments from US customers (not just European companies, of course), which led to the arrest of executives from some of those companies being arrested on stopovers in the US. This got up the nose of many in Europe. I suppose that Germany could make it an offence for the nationals of any country (including the US) to accept CC payments from German nationals to access any material online that they wish to ban.

Rock

Thought I'd just add these links, relating to the UN censure of Japan's failure to address the depictions of sexualized violence in the media, video games, etc.:

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/docs/co/CEDAW.C.JPN.CO.6.pdf

Most of the relevant stuff comes at page 6 and following.

Also, this:

http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/2009/08/29/un-urges-japan-to-ban-sale-of-games-that-normalize-violence-against-women/

Start enforcing the violence provisions in the "Adult Oriented Content Guidelines", and restrict access from German IP addresses to the new "Violent Content" sims near Zindra.

Yes to the first half of this, anyway.

As a Japanophile, and one who endeavours to respect the varied cultures on this planet, I do hope that you are correct. My thought was that Japan has now been quite globally "embarrassed", and to save face, will need to act (although to what extent, who knows). Japan has many "unenforced laws" that are there "just in case".

As you say, we shall see. But I am disturbed by the seemingly weekly accounts of government imposed censorship. We never seem to truly grasp its impact until it does hit us square in the face.

(pardon ponderous thoughts)

I expect all these measures will end up the way Jack Thompson's version in the U.S. did, with him being kicked out of his legal profession and the initiatives dumped. Anything else would be sheer madness.

That they foresaw it by creating Zindra.

Thank you for that additional information. I did have to laugh when I read:

"While the bill on the act’s revision was introduced in the Japanese parliament last year, the government decided to study the issue of virtual child pornography for three years."

You may indeed be right and nothing substantial will actually be done.

Thank you again for the links.

Agreed. Censorship casts too wide a net, and tends not to work very well anyway. The REAL answer, of course, is education, and changing attitudes.

ETA: Actually, one of the more interesting examples of censorship not working occurred when Canada chose to adopt a law restricting the importation of pornographic materials, explicitly using the feminist legal arguments formulated by Catharine MacKinnon. In the end, the new law was actually used to restrict the entry of gay and lesbian materials into the country.

My guess is that there is probably little that the government really CAN do, short term. Again, education . . . and attitudes.

Or tolerance for things we may personally find distasteful.


Unintended consequences are at least entertaining.

This is very old....but I couldn't stop thinking of this after reading this thread.

MLF Lullaby by Tom Lehrer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j20voPS0gI

Agreed, although determining what is merely "distasteful," and what is "harmful," is, of course, the rub.


Not so much for the gay and lesbian community, sadly. It was something of a wake-up call for at least some in the feminist community. MacKinnon is BRILLIANT, but this went very very badly wrong . . .

I'm trying to work out if this just Godwined the thread . . .

I'm of the opinion that censorship is generally more harmful than the material being censored.


It should serve as a wake-up call for everyone to be very careful what they wish for.