Recently I’ve been doing some research into internet pornography and obscenity laws. Or at least trying to. It’s almost impossible though. Our law is so fragmented an inaccessable the chances of you actually understanding or even knowing what the law is in one particular area is slim to none.
So far I have found the best resource available to be the vague information on Wikipedia. To say the internet is so rich with information it seems to be somewhat of a wasteland of legal info. The websites that claim to offer legal information actually offer very little of it and the official sites that claim to actually have the law for some reason never return useful results when you’re looking for it.
I’ve spent the afternoon hunting around the inner bowls of the Brotherton Library trying to find information but it’s not easy. The acts of parliament are only available in bill form. And only from about 1960 onwards. Which is great when your looking for the Obscene Publications Act 1957.
Though from what I have gathered so far on the law including the internet, books and parliamentary papers, all pornography is illegal under English law. I mean, the fact that there isn’t actually any pornography law at all and it’s just law about obscenity applied to pornography using terms like material that would “deprave and corrupt” is bad enough but the bits of law that do exist seem to either just be ignored by the entire country or ammended by some mystical event that then wiped everyone’s memory and all records of said event.
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This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.