Thirty years on, the Williams Committee Report still provides a better framework for film classification than the lamentable Obscene Publications Act, says
Julian Petley
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The Internet threatens to make US obscenity law unworkable, says Marjorie Heins
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Australia has blacklisted a webpage from the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks containing an index of URLs censored by Danish authorities.
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The government’s latest legislation on ‘extreme pornography’ is based on ill-informed notions, writes
Julian Petley
Question: what do Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Inside Linda Lovelace have in common? Answer: they were all subject to failed prosecutions under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 & 1964 (OPA). Next question: what do the Protection of Children Act 1978, the Video Recordings Act 1984, the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and the Criminal Justice Act 2008 have in common? Answer: they are all attempts to circumvent the OPA, whose provisions the censorious have long agitated against as overly liberal and ‘permissive’.
Thanks to the last of these measures, those suspected of possessing the ‘wrong’ kind of pornography can now look forward to having their homes and offices trashed by the police and their reputations publicly dragged through the mud; if convicted, they could languish for up to three years in prison. So how did we arrive at this extraordinary state of affairs?
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