Child porn should be taken off the internet, end of story
Dear Internet Watch Foundation (IWF),
As the organisation that filters out websites for internet users in the UK, you were never likely to escape controversy for long. Your ruling that the Scorpion’s 1976 album called ‘Virgin Killers’ may have an illegal front cover and you subsequently blocking the Wikipedia website that contains the album cover has caused uproar among many Wikipedia users. Some of this uproar seems justified, while some of it is just unbelievably ignorant.
Let’s start by taking a lot at the album cover in question:
On some points, I can see why Wikipedia users are kicking up a fuss. In addition to banning the image on Wikipedia, the text describing the album was also removed. I can’t really see any justification for this, unless there was a very graphic description of the image in the text. Your actions inadvertently stopped new users from registering on Wikipedia and prevented current users from editing articles as well, although I accept that this was unintended and presumably temporary. I also take the point that the album cover is still available on websites such as Amazon.
However, there are some complaints that I find particularly infuriating. I know that you consulted the police before adding this Wikipedia page to the list of banned sites, which is widely used by internet providers such as AOL and Sky to filter out illegal content. While some Wikipedia users cried foul play because a court hadn’t declared the image to be illegal, it seems very sensible to remove child porn images and other potentially illegal images until a decision can be made. This is common sense, surely. Other people have expressed concern that your organisation can decide on its own that something was illegal, which is perhaps where the real issue lies. Personally, I have no problem with an independent organisation working in tandem with internet providers to block website that contains illegal material when it comes to issues such as child pornography, terrorism websites etc. In my opinion, there is a core set of issues that this country can take a common stand against - and while it may only be a handful of topics that we can agree on, it is still an important step. I don’t see why Amazon or any other site should be allowed to display the image given its nature. Yes, the album is very old but I’m sure some online terrorist guidance and artistic works containing pornographic images of children are very old too – age is hardly a reason to ignore such websites.
As an internet user and free citizen, I am keen to ensure that the IWF does not overstep the mark. There needs to be very specific clarification on the role and remit of the IWF to prevent any unwanted intrusion on freedom of speech or freedom of expression online. For example, the government forcing internet providers to provide details of people who distribute copyrighted material online was a disgrace because I don’t believe that it is for the government to decide what happens online and what does not. While I accept that my preferred option of holding a referendum so that the public can decide which types of illegal content and illegal websites to ban will probably never come to fruition, I find it appalling that people will actively defend putting an image of a naked child on the internet, regardless of the context. A few carefully worded sentences is all that’s needed to stop this kind of situation recurring in future.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
The correct time for complaints against this album cover was when the album was released. For it to have been acceptable in shops and online stores for 30 years and then suddenly be unsuitable because it’s on the internet is rather pathetic. If the picture were deemed illegal it should have been illegal 30 years ago. If it was deemed legal, it shouldn’t have been blocked. Ergo, it’s legal and should have been left
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the whole story.
My ISP never blocked it.
And I bet Wiki’s hits went up yesterday as everyone checked to see if they could still access it!
Spot on Stu. We now have the ridiculous situation where some specific ISPs (though not, interestingly BT -my provider), are blocking access to an image of an album available freely available on every high street across the land for the past 30 years…
Nobody’s saying that Child Porn should be freely available on the internet but ridiculous, knee-jerk, ill-conceived actions by self-appointed guardians like the IWF will only have the effect of discouraging ISPs from co-operating with them out of fear they’ll do something else ridiculous next.
I don’t think anyone can say for sure that no complaints were lodged 30 years ago (happy to be proved wrong!), but I don’t accept the argument that because no-one showed it was illegal before then they can’t show it is illegal now – that’s ridiculous, seeing as the law inevitably evolves and changes over time. Something that was once legal may become illegal at some point, such as selling tobacco over the counter (although best not to start a debate on that as well!)
Seeing as they work with the police and presumably need permission for blocking any website from the police, I would hardly describe their actions as ridiculous or ill-conceived. If an image is illegal then so be it – complaining about the law on child images is a separate issue.
Until someone is prosecuted successfully for possessing it under pornography regulations, its a legal image. If its a legal image offline, its a legal image online. Complaints don’t mean anything – people complain baselessly about stuff all the time (Jerry Springer The Opera, anyone?).
Until someone is prosecuted, it remains a legal image as we do still, just about, live in a society where things are legal until they’re not and not a society where only things expressly allowed are permissible.
This is, as Guido pointed out, a dry run for blocking specific content. Which is the reason the Police and authorities were keen on it – the question for them is ‘what next’? Will it be renaissance art of naked children and cherubs frolicking or will it be other content that our overlords disagree with or otherwise dislike?
>> self-appointed guardians like the IWF
I can see the argument in favour of there being some form of independent organisation such as the IWF, able to act more quickly than a Court – particularly for a media that changes as quickly as the Internet.
But there needs to be a greater degree of common sense applied in its operations. The IWF’s remit is an extremely important one, and which needs to continue. If it fell into disrepute then there could be great harm.
Such disrepute could result from acting in the way that Stu and Shaun have pointed out. It could also result from adopting an unnecessarily strict approach – LFAT’s editing of the picture, whilst understandable, also obscures the central issue which is that the superimposed image of a crack in the glass also saves some of the girl’s modesty; whether this is enough, I don’t know, but I would have thought it arguable. In combination with the age of the image, its wide availability elsewhere, and the inevitable collateral damage to Wikipedia, I would have thought that the decision should have been different.
As the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility. I hope that the fallout from this decision does not harm the IWF’s reputation and its ability to act in more serious cases.
>> I don’t think anyone can say for sure that no complaints
>> were lodged 30 years ago
Some clearly were; the album cover was changed for some markets where the original was not permitted. In other jurisdictions (including the US) it was permitted.
LFAT, your reference to police involvement is irrelevant. The only place where Police decide what is legal and ilegal is a police state. Ask Damien Green…
And they don’t need permission to block sites – they have voluntary arrangements with some, though not all, ISPs who are pledged to apply their recommendations. Its all down to the IWFs judgement which we can now see is a bit reactionary. Remember, most ISPs don’t sign up to their scheme – BT (BT!) haven’t applied it, at least not in this case.
Patently, I assume that the police are used in an advisory capacity, that’s all.
I didn’t edit the image myself – it was from the Telegraph this morning. I see where Guido is coming from, but the final conclusion of all this is not set in stone. Labour might be looking at this from an authoritarian point of view, but I find it hard to see how people can argee against a fully independent body working with the police with every ISP to remove certain images and websites on a very tight remit. Having ISPs with their own rules will inevitably lead to confusion for the public.
If the IWF isn’t working properly then fine, change it, but I still wholeheartedly support the existence of such a body. Even though this album cover probably wasn’t the best reason to make their mark, their decision to check its legality is not the end of the world and free speech as some people have been making out.
Ah – here we are. The relevant Wikipedia Talk Page notes that:
page views for Virgin Killer went from less than 1,000 a day in early December to over 126,000 on December 7,
which suggests to me that IWF’s actions have been somewhat counterproductive.
The other point is that the content isn’t removed, access to it is blocked. As in China, people who want to see ‘blocked’ content will find ways around it with proxy servers, anonymisers and port-forwarders. Meanwhile, while decent people argue the toss over a relatively inoffensive, publicly available album cover, the REAL kiddie porn lives on happily somewhere else, untroubled by this latest moral spasm.
Remember – if blocking was foolproof, more content would be locked. As it stands, policing of child porn offences tends instead to turn upon proving who accessed it (generally, as in Ore, based on credit-card details which means we’re talking about idiots or ID-fraud victims anyway) and trying to work out who uploaded it (like that paedophile ‘librarian’ jailed earlier in the year). Its easier to record access than block it but even that is based upon relatively unsophisticated perverts.
>> I still wholeheartedly support the existence of such a body.
Oh – I’d agree wholeheartedly with that (and thought that was clear from my comments). My worry is that by picking an evidently unsuitable fight, the IWF may cause enough damage to its reputation to harm its ability to do genuinely necessary work.
I just really can’t imagine that this is the kind of thing that was intended when the IWF was set up.
Agreed, patently, definitely counter-productive.
I accept, LFaT, that some things become illegal over time, but that is not what is happening here. What is happening is that a group of Little Bloody Hitlers have decided that something is distasteful, and that if they think it is distasteful then everyone should think it is distasteful.
If the album cover is legally judged indecent it should be withdrawn from shelves, not just have its Wiki page blocked at ISP level. What’s more, as mentioned above, it’s not whether anyone complains that makes a difference – it’s whether that complaint is upheld and the artwork was banned.
Some better ideas for action by the IWF:
* Remove the image from Wikipedia and add a note to the discussion page explaining that they felt it was indecent.
* Request an alternate version of the cover, if one exists.
* File a complaint against the album cover itself.
* If they must block something, block the address of the image file, so that the Wikipedia page still appears, just without the image.
* Start blocking dangerous material that people might actually use to harm others, rather than just expressing their Whitehousian (new word, you like?) tendency to enforce their own tastes and beliefs over the artistic tastes of others.
“I assume that the police are used in an advisory capacity, that’s all.”
Would that be the same police that need lab tests to distinguish tomato plants from cannabis…?
the IWF may cause enough damage to its reputation to harm its ability to do genuinely necessary work.
It will certainly do two things: it will discourage new ISPs from joining its voluntary scheme and it will make customers fearful of censorship move to ISPs not party to their scheme because where its child porn today, what will we be protecting ourselves from tomorrow?
Needless to say, the next step will be to push to make it mandatory and I hope that stupid over-reactions such as this will kill that stone dead. But I doubt it.
Honestly, I agree that this album cover was not the right fight to pick. What I was trying to get at in my letter is that while this incident was not dealt with properly, there is a serious discussion that needs to be had about censorship on the internet.
If the IWF doesn’t do its job properly or isn’t powerful enough to do it, our beloved authoritarian masters will do it instead – and believe me when I say that will be a lot worse for everyone. By screwing around without clear guidelines, police support, decent legal advice or a proper mandate, I’m sure the IWF is going to make a lot of enemies, but that doesn’t mean the solution shouldn’t revolve around them. That said, I accept that banning a website when the album cover exists everywhere else is ridiculous.
Had the album cover come out today it would almost certainly have caused problems and would likely be sent back to the designers. But this is exactly what LFaT picked up on; that law changes over time. It’s a similar case for tobacco – had we only just discovered to New World with the knowledge we have at present then tobacco would never have made it to the open market. This inherited legacy means that innappropriate action is taken to try and cover all bases but ends up satisfying no-one.
I accept that having new laws that incriminate old material is going to cause a legal nightmare, but it is worth keeping in mind as the internet forces lawmakers to grapple with new concepts and ideas.
If the album cover is banned then obviously the situation changes – but that hasn’t happened yet, and there’s no current suggestion that it will be. I disagree with candid, I think the inertia is very much in the direction of liberalising artistic works and being less restrictive. Consider that The Dark Knight was given a 12A rating by the BBFC, for instance.
Besides, is the picture really child porn? It actually looks far more suggestive when pixelated as above than it does in its original form, bizarrely enough. It also hasn’t been an issue until it was blocked today. Making it illegal because the IWF banned it is letting the tail wag the dog.
[...] Internet Censorship and Child Pornography [...]
If that was the image, then yes, it should be off the net. However, how did Wiki come into it?
Because the effect of censoring it seems to have inadvertantly blocked some Wiki admin from altering the page, thus bringing their action into public view.
Who knows what else they’ve censored? They are totally unaccountable.
“the list of banned sites, which is widely used by internet providers such as AOL and Sky to filter out illegal content”
AFAIK, AOL is the one major ISP operating in the UK that doesn’t use IWF blacklist (presumably it doesn’t have the ability to block pages in the UK only, and would be in deep legal trouble if it tried to apply the UK’s very tough censorship regime in the US, where freedom of speech is held as extremely important and is protected by the constitution).
I think it would be a shame if this cock-up leads to the total abolition of the IWF, as it clearly has a role to play. However, it’s clear major restructuring is needed to make it fit for purpose and avoid these sorts of mistakes in the future.
Bearing in mind that the the police don’t know what is or isn’t illegal porn passing the buck to the IWF who spur doses of criticism and (for balance) support from the UK’s IT practitioners, it is worth noting that the police refer instances of dodgy picture advice… to the IWF who are a voluntary body.
But honestly, we take kiddy porn very seriously. Honest.
Oooh first to gloat at their climbdown! And kudos to patently who beat these self-appointend, optional, opt-in, better-angels-of-our nature to the obviously counterproductive nature of this endeavour
The fact that the album cover was legal 30 years ago is beside the point – 30 years ago, soft-core nudey magazines could print pictorials of 16- and 17-year old models – which is now illegal.
And yet the law does not provide for retroactive liability, a concept abhorent to UK law, English or Scottish.
Should we also ban this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NAMA_X15118_Marathon_Boy_3.JPG?
The IWF, to be honest, are a pain in the backside.
The problem with this country at the moment is the hysteria over child pornography, the hysteria ensures that the issue can’t be debated seriously without one side fraudulently claiming that the other side doesn’t care about the children.
The IWF exploits this situation by trumpeting very loudly that it is there to protect the children, when in all honestly it abuses its position by promoting fear and using that as its mandate to censor.
Yes there is a place for an organisation to provide a block list, but it should aim to use censorship as a last resort, and not a first one. It also needs to start looking at context as well.
It wasn’t just legal 30 years ago, MikeG, it’s legal now. Unless you have some evidence to the contrary, that is. I’ve not heard anyone suggest (yet) that it is an illegal image. The IWF have acted entirely inappropriately and counter-productively and they would have been better off saving their effort for something that might have actually helped make the world a better place.
Incidentally, is it illegal to own a copy of a soft-core nudey magazine legally bought 30 years ago? That’s a slightly shady area of law, I imagine…
@Stu: Whoops, didn’t mean to imply that the album cover is now illegal, even if the IWF held it was “potentially” so. Which raises the intriguing question of how something actually gets classed as illegal…
As far as ancient nudey mags go, the Sex Offences Act 2003 raised the age of a “child” from 16 to 18, so any such mags which featured models under 18 are now retroactively illegal. Isn’t that some interesting trivia?