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British Video Recordings Act 1984 Invalid
chrb writes "BBC News is reporting that the British Video Recordings Act 1984 is invalid due to a 25 year old legal blunder. The Thatcher government of the day failed to officially "notify" the European Commission about the law, and hence it no longer stands as a legal Act. There will now be a period of around three months before the Act can be passed again, during which time it will be entirely legal to sell any video content without age-rated certifications."
"Our legal advice is that those previously prosecuted will be unable to overturn their prosecution or receive financial recompense," she said.
So people who were previously prosecuted for breaking a non-law will be unable to overturn their prosecution.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
Pending prosecutions will be abandoned, but existing convictions will stand.
So, yes, they will just keep them in jail.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
IANA(British)L, but here's the gist:
The UK joined the EEC in 1973. Council Directive 83/189/EEC was passed in March 1983. It says that if a country passes "standards" it has to notify other countries.
See, the EEC (now the EU) is designed to allow freer trade between countries. You can't do that if you're implementing standards that you're not telling other people about. It makes for a "gotcha" situation: "Hey, you didn't follow the standard, and we're going to prosecute you under our laws, even though you followed all the rules you knew about."
I have a feeling that in a "law and order" country like the US, the law would never actually stop being enforced - law enforcement and judiciary would make up something about the "spirit" of the law or some other legal nonsense.
Got a citation for that or are you just looking to repeat stereotypes about the US? It's interesting that you could condemn the US criminal justice system when we still have our right to remain silent and right against self-incrimination. Tell me, how are those rights faring in the UK? Surely they don't hold it against you if you remain silent or compel you to be a witness against yourself?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The point of such a clause is so that every member country in the EU is notified of any regulations you have passed that affect doing commerce in your country so that they know all know about. Seems to be a rather sane idea contrary to the usual knee-jerk anti-EU hysteria that will come about in this thread. Would you like to be sued because you sold something in the UK, for instance, and didn't know they had passed some new regulation that required you to jump through some legal loophole before you could sell your product?
Technology has made it irrelevant anyway. Any kid can get any video he wants over the network.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Except it was the tories that signed the Maastricht treaty under John Major, which gave up more british sovereignty than anything else. Not saying Labour would have been any better, but it was the tories that gave up a lot of our indepenance
Watch those corners
Wikipedia has a List of Video Nasties. If you live in Britain, but have never seen La Maldicion de la Bestai or La Bestia in Calore, you may have a window of opportunity.
All members of the EU transfer a part of their sovereignty to the European Union. The EU is as "outside" to any EU member state, as the USA is "outside" to California.
Therefore all convictions since 1984 should be nullified, since the law itself is voided by the treaty.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
British movie/game ratings are pretty simple.
There is:
U - Universal - suitable for all
PG - Parental Guidance
12/12A - for videos, nobody under age 12 is allowed to purchase it. for movies shown in a cinema, under twelves can watch it if they are accompanied by an adult.
15 - suitable for 15+
18 - suitable for 18+
R18 - Restricted 18 - basically porn. Can only be shown in specially licensed venues and sold only in licensed sex shops.
'E' is on some videos. It's not actually a rating, but it's just a symbol put on by video producers to specify that the film is exempt from rating. Things like videos of sports matches, musical performances, educational videos don't get rated. Most imported videos
The BBFC also now produce some text that accompanies the rating symbol which broadly gives the reason why the film is rated that way. For instance, it might say "Contains frequent strong bloody violence and very strong language" next to an 18 certificate.
They introduced R18 a few years ago when they realised that hardcore porn was mostly being circulated through the black market and by people distributing copied tapes. Of course, now, we have the new rules on "violent and extreme" pornography which actually makes it a crime to possess pornography that depicts violent scenarios - rape fantasies, that kind of stuff. With one hand, the government make porn a bit more legal, and with the other hand, they've created a new black market that the Internet supplies.
The BBFC is generally, imo, pretty fair - I mean, as fair as a bunch of censoring, free-speech-restricting thugs can be. Perhaps it's just bias living here, but BBFC seem to get it right a lot more often than the MPAA ratings do, and they are a hell of a lot less squeamish about depiction of sex and nudity - they make a distinction for 'natural nudity' where it's non-sexual, so we don't have idiotic philistines sticking big blocky pixels over Dürer woodcuts, Titian paintings and Michaelangelo's David (etc.) because they've got HUR HUR HUR DONGS LOL. There's an interesting set of articles by people who have worked at BBFC, describing exactly what it's like censoring movies and video games for a living.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
"Don't be a reactionary."
Don't be a slave.
In These United States, the Founders set up a Federal division for a good reason... power corrupts, so split it up. And the further the government is from citizens, the less attuned they'll be to those citizens. This is why State and Local governments have been more powerful than their equivalents in Europe. If anything, Federalism and the limits on national government are more important than ever. With over 300 million people, there's simply no way the feds can ever be attuned to local and state concerns, and they'll simply run roughshod over the citizenry, as they've demonstrated increasingly over the decades.
The notion of an all-powerful national government isn't just bad practice. It is well and truly anti-American, and would be opposed vociferously be even the staunchest of the advocates of central government among our founders, save perhaps for Alexander Hamilton. And I'm pretty sure that if someone ever told Washington or Jefferson that some extra-national entity could void US laws, they'd start loading their muskets. Even Lincoln, the father of modern concentrated Presidential power would object to that.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel