UK folks, take care: new laws

In practice of course it is immensely, immensely unlikely that such a law would be used in SL. As the Register points out, there is already a 1955 act making it illegal to publish 'cartoons depicting crime, violence or “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature”', resulting in one prosecution ever, which failed.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/28/government_outlaws_pictures/

None of this would make me any less likely to have a child av, were I so inclined, for fear of prosecution. What is far more likely is that there will be some sort of media outrage at some point, as with the German case.

I do think that it is a stupid law but I would not expect it to have any effect on those of us in the United Kingdom merely by virtue of having child avatars.

so in other words if someone were to send an email with this type of content and it gets cached that it's breaking the law?anytime you log into the net you risk coming a crossed this kind of content with sites named to fool people..
i would look at what they are really trying to do..when you see a bunch of stupid laws that cannot be policed it is usually to take advantage of something in the system..
like a magician they show you one hand while the other is pulling the trick off..

So why have people been prosecuted for bringing porn home from the Netherlands then?

This begs the question what is "non-extreme" porn?
We could all end up as Barbie and Ken dolls, or be unable to take off underwear.

I can see a new poll coming:

"Would you quit SL if you couldn't take off your underwear?

To paraphrase the ACT, extreme pornography is "explicit and realistic", depicts a life being threatened or an act likely to cause serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals, or depicts sex with corpses or animals and "a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real". Anything else is not extreme.

And since I never wear underwear I vote for pie on the poll.

No. You are mistaking SL for something like a single website, or to be more accurate, you are blowing up a storm where there isn't even a breath of air. Your reasoning is so outlandish that it isn't worth discussing.

No - it's a defense that the content "was not sent as the result of a request and was not retained for any length of time", so an unsolicited e-mail wouldn't break the law.



The reasoning behind the defenses that say "no request" and "no reason to suspect" is to prevent the case where a person effectively can freely surf through BDSM porn sites as long as they don't visit the same one twice - by arguing that, immediately prior to any given click, they didn't know with 100% certainty that such images would exist on the coming page.

(Of course the real problem for this draconian wording is that laws now have to be written on the basis that defense lawyers will spot loopholes on clients' behalf, regardless of the truth )

However, the same argument would seem to apply to a person teleporting to a BDSM build on SL arguing that they did not know for 100% certain that there could be such textures there.



Um, I'm not sure what you mean there. Do you mean that, if Coutts had called an expert witness to testify that the "breathplay" wasn't really dangerous, then the court would have had to conclude that he killed Longhurst some other way?

Many politicians have treated SL as a single website - that's exactly the issue.

all this stuff has been banned from sl anyways..
you are not allowed to have images like those in sl.

A point I made earlier in this thread.

But I would say that the vast majority of BDSM places in SL do NOT have extreme pornographic images. Some do, most have pornographic images, but few of them have anything that I would regard as falling within the definition in the act. Remember we're talking about death or "serious injury", we're not talking about leaving a few whipmarks. It's arguable that means an injury that constitute GBH in other contexts, since "serious injury" has been held to be synonymous with GBH.



Precisely - his defence depended on her death being an accident while engaged in sexual breathplay. Evidence that such practices are not dangerous would blow a huge hole in his defence.

That may well be true. At the same time, both situations are, nevertheless, highly improbable.



And I think you might be counting a lot of chickens -- not before they've been hatched, but before they've even been laid. This doesn't serve any of us very well.

Mari

And the jury is completely free to disregard anything the judge tells them about the law and vote their conscience. Otherwise a trial by jury is worthless.

True, but I wouldn't want to rely on the consciences of most of my fellow Britons.

This definition, voids the whole thing in terms of Avatars in SL as it is. Even the most realistic avatars apperances are not going to be mistaken for real people or animals. When they want to go after SL extreme stuff, they will have to change the wording there---unless they will be counting chat or voice as well. RL images or movies that fit that description, displayed in Sl would be a violation.

The sicko's need not worry if that defintion is used. Their Porky Pigs can still rape Donald Ducks all they want.

To be fair to Yumi, the OP was about RL pics in SL bing caught by the 2008 Act. And the child porn law that was mooted today is specifically about drawings and computer-generated images, not RL photos.

I wonder, then, what would be the case if:

1) Someone uploads pictures to SL that would be illegal under this law

2) Uses them as a texture on a prim

3) Uses a script to set the prim to 100% alpha

4) Places it in a high-traffic area



Since even full alpha textures are rendered, that means they will reside on the user's computer, in the SL cache.

So the person has absolutely no way of knowing the images are there, as they aren't visible on the screen when they're in SL... yet they still "possess" the images on their hard drive, if someone goes looking for them...

...Get the tinfoil hat on now and make sure it's shaped to a proper point. (^_^)y

they havent requested them. if, there is no specific evidence of request.. i believe it would be difficult to bring a prosecution, imagine.. one is driving along the road.. hidden in the vehicle ahead are some folks involved in "illegal sex" just being on the road, does not make one an accomplice, one has not requested to see the images, even if as one passes the car, one sees the sex taking place...
or it remains hidden.

so many laws exist to cover extreme circumstances, and have been brought to bear to prove a point. the lady who was prosecuted for eating while driving is an example.


For me the saddest thing is that the law often persecutes itself, things that might be discovered, because folks see it.. remain hidden, and are not discovered.. the child dies, its body discovered years later and the guilty remain free or undiscovered.. where there is a will there is a way.... ok one can make law. one can break it... the will and the way..


nothing changes.. in hundreds of years of law evolvement... even the death sentence did not stop folks killing each other.. in effect what happens is that the law becomes as brutal as the law breakers.. as non descriptive or definable as the law breakers are.. one method becomes the other.. from a different point of view..

That doesn't make sense. What does their being a child av have to do with the griefer having sex? They're still not participating. Are you saying that if you have an image of two adults having sex, and draw a picture of a fully clothed child on the side of the image, it's now child pornography under the law?

In any event, you can't guarantee that you won't have a griefer assuming a child form and having sex. It's against the rules, but it still takes time for someone to enforce it. If you allow that argument, then it doesn't matter whether the logging in has a child or adult or non-human av.

Yes. At times I'm a damn PROUD American.

And other times, I hang my head in shame, thinking "WTF??".

I blame part of this on the People. If anyone cared to read what the forefathers wrote & what they meant, they'd see that they DID NOT want a bunch of politicians telling us how to live.

This is part of the reason I consider myself an Anarchist.
Let the People decide on the Laws, not some rich politician with an agenda.

Being a Republic, and not a Democracy, it is meant that we elect people to represent us in the government. They are charged with making the laws and such, be we have a responsibility as well. To be informed. To stay on top of what these people are doing in our name. to know what they stand for when we elect them. to let them know when we don't like what they are doing. And to vote them out when they do. That's where things have fallen apart. We're not doing our part, and they are stealing the candy store out from under us. They are supposed to be our servants, we pay their salary. But they have turned it around on us, mostly by our fault. And it is getting worse. Adams, Jefferson and Madison must be spinning in their graves over what their dream has become.

I came to SL from UK and I was under the impression that the stuff mentioned in the original post has been illegal for some time.

A recipe for civil war!!!

Only if one group insists on imposing it's will upon the other group by force. Ideally, it would be a recipe for break up and secession.

Lawmakers pass bills with an eye toward being reelected. I've always believed this is why freedom is slowly eroded. One becomes more electable by banning something that sounds bad regardless of what freedoms are crushed in the process. This goes along with what Brenda said above too. Too bad someone smarter than me hasn't thought up a better system yet.

I for one am horrified at the UK law talking about extracting images out of context for prurient gratifiaction. That's a mighty slippery slope and harks back to our (USA) McCarthyism.