Legal Research

Scorpions album cover - child porn?

By scott

A number of sites seem to have picked up this story from Wikinews that a number of the UK’s main ISPs are using filtering software to block access the sites - and in this case Wikipedia entries - that contain material that has been flagged by the Internet Watch Foundation as containing or hosting material that could be considered child porn.

There seems to have been some bizarre shock that this is occuring, as it if was something new, yet I was writing about this four years ago.In my article Filtering out child porn — smoke and mirrors? (2004) 6 EBL 10, 11 ; I wrote how BT had begun using Cleanfeed to block access the sites, and how the UK’s other ISPs were likely to follow suit.

The UK internet industry has been operating a self-regulatory ‘notice and takedown’ procedure for criminal content for years, where the ISPs will remove illegal content hosted on their systems once they have been alerted that material that is actually illegal is being hosted on a UK server. Because much of this illegal content is hosted outside of the UK, and following pressure by the UK’s Home Office, most ISPs have now moved to the Cleanfeed approach - effectively outsourcing part of their filtering task.

Back in 2004, I raised the point that the biggest issue was the lack of any mechanism in place to notify sites that the material was there and allow them to defend themselves against the charge if they so desired; and also to monitor if individual sites became ‘clean’ . Domains often change hands, so how would a purchaser of a domain name know, or find out, if the domain that he had just purchased was being ‘filtered’ or blocked by an ISP or cleanfeed, when they do not publicly publish the sites they block.

I also mentioned how little was known about if the flitering was done by URL, DNS and/or IP address.

In today’s case the material that has been blocked on Wikipedia is an 1976 album cover by the band The Scorpions, for their album Virgin Killer. The cover shows a young girl posing nude, with a lens crack covering over her genitals. It is a strong image, and I can understand how some people would question it, and how some would defend it.

The Internet Watch Foundation, an organisation I have a lot of respect for, confirmed they had blacklisted a wikipedia page:

“A Wikipedia web page, was reported through the IWF?s online reporting mechanism in December 2008. As with all child sexual abuse reports received by our Hotline analysts, the image was assessed according to the UK Sentencing Guidelines Council (page 109). The content was considered to be a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18, but hosted outside the UK. The IWF does not issue takedown notices to ISPs or hosting companies outside the UK, but we did advise one of our partner Hotlines abroad and our law enforcement partner agency of our assessment. The specific URL (individual webpage) was then added to the list provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child.”

Now, the IWF’s position seems quite clear, and I certainly do not think they have done anything wrong.

That said, this now poses an interesting and quite serious question. If you own a copy of this album, you have in your posession/own a copy of the same image that the IWF, at least, thinks is potentially child porn. Should we now be expecting the police to barge down doors, to charge people, and put them on the sex offenders register?? It may sound like I am joking, but this is a serious issue. I’m sure there a quite a lot of Scorpions fans out there who own this album, and own this version (a later release had a band photo on the cover instead) and therefore could potentially find themselves open to child porn possession charges, and up to 5 years in prison.

All this misses the wider, and more important issue - that again I touched on in my original article - which is that whilst the action of the ISPs (and Cleanfeed) may be very noble, their actions do nothing to stop child porn. Yes, they stop their users from accessing content that has been deemed to be child porn, but this does nothing to stop the actual distribution of such images, nor to prevent the images being created in the first place. As, a result, these filtering programmes, although good PR for those involved, arguably merely hide, rather than actually doing anything about the problem itself.

Full post as published by Information Overload on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).