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The trouble with censorship, is, once you’ve started, it’s not just the authors who are punished that concern me, but those who start self-censoring, or decide to not write because of it. Self-censoring, or electing “not-to” is worse aspect of these laws, IMO, as that’s material that’s permanently lost because it’s never created. (Of course, those doing the censoring will argue that’s the point of censoring).

Not going to reproduce the article here, but I will provide a link. Wow… I hope this does not come to pass :/ The most chilling parts: https://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2016/10/19/they-are-coming-for-the-internet-new-porn-and-copyright-laws-could-criminalise-millions/ Thoughts, anyone? Anyone else who comes here from the UK?

Well, I live in the same country that imprisoned Oscar Wilde for the crime of being gay, calling it “gross indecency” at whose sentencing the judge said: Also the same country that convicted the brilliant (and gay) mathematician Alan Turing for “indecency” (why this seems to be a pattern!), making him submit to a “cure” (oh, no, wait… it’s getting worse – cure actually means chemical castration). From the court record, word for word: To this day, there are still men living in Britain who were convicted under the same law – for being gay. So… can I imagine being forced to defend the writing I produce in a court of law, in this country in which I live? Yes, I can… all too easily. They’ll probably come out with some new “obscene publication” law. Although, apart from all the disturbing and horrific BDSM I write (which I would defend, even if it ended in prison time), the idea of an actual court starting down the path of the tl;dr “Why slash?” thing is a little bit hillarious.

Hmm… many outlaws will we have when they make writing/reading without a license illegal? Fahrenheit 451 anyone?

What the hell is going on in the UK? It’s all going tits up there.

Very well said. As much as I dislike the Celebrity subdomain here (and I’ve never been shy about saying so or why), I will concede that it does belong here, under the very appropriate real-person fiction limits we have. I’m not and never want to be the arbiter of what is permissible from a creative standpoint.

If arbitrarily deciding that created content is worthless becomes a thing, regardless of the consumers of that content and their more informed opinion, then I demand all cultish celebrity television be forced to stop broadcasting immediately. The point is, regardless of personal preference, all content is worth something. We are all different, we all have differing tastes, and there should be a place for everyone to play, whether their tastes run towards extremes, slash, celebrity or anything else under the sun. As long as no one is harmed, then there can be no logical argument for censorship. I agree with your view that this would lead to a decrease in creativity, and that would be a very sad thing IMO too.

It doesn’t include the written word… yet. Though the kind of people who think these things up will have that in their sights, I’m sure. The age verification they propose is not satisfied by a “Proceed” question either. It has to be done via credit card or something similar. But then again, he makes the point they have no clue how the internet works. There’s no way to police it for content hosted outside the UK, which has no obligation to conform to any act passed by our parliament, and therefore makes the entire thing ridiculous. As he says, it’s the smaller UK content providers who are going to be hurt by this. Those who produce pornography that fits in a niche, that probably isn’t created exclusively by men, for men, and isn’t necessarily hetero or vanilla. Sad. I doubt this has anything to do with what children see or not on the internet: there are plenty of parental control things out there, and if that fails, supervision of online time would work. I’ve always thought that letting kids loose on the internet is a bit like leaving them on a street corner. But anyway, I think that’s just a convenient facade to justify a war on pornography (especially certain kinds of pornography). Yet again, I find myself wondering what the hell people have against it. They don’t have to watch, it’s easy to avoid. I’m always tempted to think that some of us are just more adult than others. *sighs*