GagWatch

LINX Public Affairs (via) has been looking at the answer Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker gave to Parliament last week when asked about the legal consequences of the judgment in the Court of Appeal in R v Perrin [2002].

The Minister declared that all R18 type material - that is, clear images of real sex between consenting adults - would be illegal to publish on the Internet unless “behind a suitable payment barrier or other accepted means of age verification”. This includes both commercial pornography and “non-commercial, user-generated material”.

In other words, free explicit pornography online is illegal.

Commercial sites aren’t much better off, either. Those that provide any sort of free tour - which is pretty much all of them - will now be considered to be breaking British law if they are deemed to operate within the UK jurisdiction. As for jurisdiction, Perrin was a UK resident but published his website using an American server.

In Perrin, the defendant faced two separate charges of publishing obscenity contrary to the Obscene Publications Act 1959; one charge related to material he was selling access to through his web site, the other related to material on his web site that was available before/without having paid.

The judge instructed the jury that that in respect of material paid for by credit card the legal standard is whether the material would “tend to deprave and corrupt” an adult, but in respect of freely available material the question is whether it would “tend to deprave and corrupt” a child, a direction approved by the Court of Appeal (albeit not without criticising the judge’s lack of clarity). The jury then convicted Perrin for the free pornography, but acquitted him for that which was sold.

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