Tag Archives: myles jackman

Queen's Speech Promises State Censorship

Breaking: Dominatrix Challenges Anti-Porn ATVOD Law

Legal, News, , , ,

Readers of this blog will remember the December law (aka AVMS 2014) which outlaws content on UK adult websites stronger than the BBFC’s R18 certificate. This is the law that prompted the facesitting protest outside Parliament – how could you forget?

The regulator appointed by the government responsible for checking whether someone has sat on someone’s face a bit too long, or spanked someone a bit too hard (yes, it really exists) is known as ATVOD. ATVOD has now taken its first actions under the new law, serving notice on two dominatrices that their sites contain illegal content. One of the dommes closed her site after being approached by ATVOD, but the other is challenging the validity of AVMS 2014.

The ATVOD ruling makes clear the state’s squeamish and censorious approach to fetish pornography, stating:

Banned pornographic material made available on the UK based services included videos of heavy whipping likely to cause lasting physical harm, the infliction of pain on a person who appears unable to withdraw consent, and repeated strong kicks to the genitals which appear to draw blood. Such material has been prohibited on UK based VOD services since 1 December 2014 under new statutory regulations designed to bring online rules into line with those that operate offline. Other videos featuring explicit images of real sex and BDSM material could also be accessed by children on the internet services, in breach of further statutory requirements.

For a regulator whose remit is supposed to cover all forms of video entertainment, ATVOD’s CEO Pete Johnson appears to spend a high proportion of his time chasing down dommes. Approached for comment, Obscenity law specialist Myles Jackman pondered:

“The appropriately named Mr Johnson appears to have a particular fixation for slapping Female Dominatrixes’ websites with adverse determinations. Only he can answer if he enjoys singling out female-owned cottage-industry producers over global industry players.”

Shockingly, the new law was pushed through without a parliamentary vote, using a parliamentary procedure designed for rubber-stamping EU legislation into UK law. But the ban on fetish porn does not appear to be justified by EU legislation, and currently the UK is the only EU country to take such an action. Campaigners believe that the new law should have been subject to a full debate and vote by MPs.

Mistress R’eal has appealed against ATVOD’s ruling that her site is in breach of regulations on the basis that the December law is not valid. We wish her luck in defending her right to free expression. Her full appeal is as follows:

“I submit that the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, which introduced sections 368E(2) and (3) into the Communications Act 2003, were made ultra vires the Secretary of State’s power to pass secondary legislation under section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972. Section 2(2) gives the Secretary of State the power to pass secondary legislation for the purpose of implementing any EU obligation or for the purpose of dealing with matters arising out of or related to EU obligations. I note that the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (2010/13/EU) imposes an obligation on Member States to prohibit hate speech on ODPS (Art. 6); by contrast, it does not contain any obligation to ban content that may be harmful to minors from ODPS, only an obligation to ensure that access to such content is appropriately restricted (Article 12). In the premises, I fail to see how the 2014 Regulations (and, by extension, section 368E(2) & (3) of the 2003 Act), could be said to implement an obligation in the AVMS Directive or to deal with matters arising out of related to that Directive. The 2014 Regulations plainly go well beyond the scope of the directive – and, in doing so, subvert the appropriate democratic process for dealing with an important human rights (free speech) issue. In light of the foregoing, I submit that the 2014 Regulations and sections 368E(2)-(3), CA2003 are void – as so, by extension, is ATVOD’s Rule 14, which is based solely on the aforementioned sections of the Communications Act 2003.”

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“Obscenity Lawyer” Myles Jackman launches new site

Legal, , ,

Those who follow this blog, or sexual freedom issues in the UK in general, might be familiar with Myles. He not only defends individuals who have fallen foul of Britain’s censorious anti-sex laws, but seeks ways to challenge and overturn them. Today, Myles launched his new website – check it out. I hope you won’t need him, but you never know!

Law Society Junior Lawyer of the Year. Solicitor-Advocate specialising in Obscenity and Extreme Pornography cases. Obscenity Lawyer

Source: Myles Jackman – Obscenity Lawyer

Vid: The London Porn Protest

Events, , , , , , ,

Here is a 20 minute video covering the highlights of last Friday’s porn protest outside the UK Parliament. With thanks to Terry Stephens (aka The Naked Truth Guy), who shot and edited it (follow him on Twitter).

The video includes my speech on behalf of Sex & Censorship, along with speeches by organiser Charlotte Rose, lawyer Myles Jackman and CAAN representative Jane Fae.

Tiger Porn: “Extreme Porn” Law to be Challenged

Legal, News, , ,

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the dangerous proliferation of content possession laws that have sprung up in the UK. These have resulted in a series of draconian rulings, including one that decided a teenage girl was a sex offender for taking a photograph of herself naked. This conviction was made under a law designed to prevent child abuse. Such badly drafted laws surely do nothing to achieve this, and plenty to tie up police resources that could be better directed elsewhere.

Content possession laws are dangerous, regardless of what they criminalise, because content possession is such a vague idea. How many people realise that receiving a photograph by email or WhatsApp constitutes possession, whether or not you even look at it? Or that browsing to a web page containing a banned image will store that image in the web browser cache, making the user a criminal? And most important, how can members of the public know what images might or might not be considered “extreme” by the prurient British state?

 The “extreme porn” law, introduced by the last Labour government in 2008, is perhaps the most dangerous of them all, criminalising a vast array of content, from bestiality to acts that might “result in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals” – this would cover consensual and legal acts like fisting or the use of a large sex toy.

One of the most ludicrous prosecutions to arise from this law was the infamous “tiger porn” case, in which Andrew Holland was prosecuted for possessing a video of – it was claimed – a woman having sex with a tiger. This would certainly represent a dangerous sex act!

The police and prosecutors decided there was a case, and proceeded. When the case finally reached court, the judge requested that the video be played with sound – something the police hadn’t thought of doing. During the scene, the “tiger” turned to the camera and said “that’s grrrrreat!”, in the style of Tony, the Frosties tiger. It’s clear that police and CPS training doesn’t include the skills to distinguish between a real tiger and a pretend one. Holland was acquitted.

But during the legal process, he had been branded a sex offender, experienced vigilante attacks, and been prevented from seeing his daughter for a year. He suffered a heart attack during this time.

The obscenity law specialist Myles Jackman announced yesterday that Holland would be launching a judicial review against the extreme porn law.

This is good news indeed; besides potentially overturning an atrocious piece of legislation, it may also help disrupt yet another bad law, the impending “rape porn” legislation, which, rather than criminalising porn featuring rape (as it sounds), will leave police and a judge to decide whether a sex act looks like it might be non-consensual, and would thus criminalise bondage and other non-standard – but consenting – sex acts.

In the mean time, millions of people risk being branded sex offenders simply for receiving a message from a friend (or enemy) or browsing the web. They can, to some extent, protect themselves by using private browser settings, and asking their friends not to share any kind of sexual imagery. But it is ludicrous that they should have to.

Censorship Laws Used To Attack Homosexuals

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In September 2011, a man accessed a legal gay porn site from a hotel room’s computer. A subsequent guest saw the site listed in the browser history and (for reasons best known to herself) complained to the hotel management. Six months later, the man was arrested and his computer seized. Police later charged him with making indecent images of children and possession of an image of a child being abused.

This week, the charges were dropped. The images were all found to come from legal web sites and were of young-looking men, but not of children. What is truly bizarre is that the police had not bothered to carry out the most basic checks on their evidence before presenting the case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Neither had the CPS questioned the poor state of the evidence before deciding to take the case to court. Meanwhile, a man had been publicly linked to child abuse – a slur that ruins lives, whether or not it has any substance.

The case collapsed because the man’s lawyer, Myles Jackman, carried out the basic evidence-checking that the authorities had failed to do, and found that the images came from a site that had retained model identification information under America’s USC 2257 law. Even when he presented this evidence to the CPS, they failed to drop charges for several more months. After two years of having his name dragged through the mud (during which time his father died, never seeing the outcome of the case), the man was exonerated.

Jackman believes there is strong evidence that the CPS uses its powers to persecute gay men. The same appears to apply to the police. Indeed, after homosexuality was legalised, the police continued to raid gay venues, using the Obscene Publications Act (OPA) rather than the previous laws that had allowed them to directly target homosexuals.

In the infamous Spanner case of 1987, police prosecuted gay men who had videoed their sadomasochistic parties. Although their acts all took place in private, and between consenting adults, they were convicted of causing wounding and actual bodily harm; the judge ruled that a person had no right to consent be assaulted (although this ruling doesn’t seem to apply in TV shows like Jackass, which are deemed suitable for UK TV broadcast).

In the 2012 Michael Peacock case, another gay man was prosecuted, this time under the OPA, for distributing “obscene” gay S&M videos. OPA prosecutions usually result in a guilty plea to avoid the publicity and cost of a trial, but Peacock chose to defend himself (Jackman was his solicitor), and was found not guilty by a jury, in a decision that left the very basis of UK obscenity law in tatters.

Also in 2012, Simon Walsh (who is, you might have guessed, a gay man) was charged under the ridiculous 2008 “extreme porn” law, for possession of images of sex between consenting gay men; again, he was found not guilty, but only at the cost of his career and at huge personal expense.

The state, it appears, has not yet accepted that homosexuality is legal. Furthermore, the existence of a series of badly written censorship laws has given the police and CPS the power to harass people at will, whether for homophobic or other reasons. Laws drafted to protect children from abuse,  and to “protect” the public from obscene material (whether or not the public needs or wants such protection) are used as tools of persecution.

The original British censorship law, the OPA, seems to serve no useful purpose. Denmark scrapped its obscenity laws in 1969, yet Danish society failed to collapse. But in recent decades, an endless stream of new censorship laws have been added to the statute books, most of them more illiberal than the OPA, which at least allows the accused to request a trial by jury.

Somehow, most democracies survive without the weight of state censorship power that the British authorities have at their disposal. Indeed, some of these laws would be unconstitutional in the United States. Perhaps it is time to join the dots: Spanner, Peacock, Walsh, as well as this week’s events, as well as many others. Censorship appears to gain us nothing as a society, but it erodes the rights of law-abiding citizens, and especially those of sexual minorities.