On Monday Baroness Howe published details of her latest legislative assault in defence of children. It takes the form of the Digital Economy Act 2017 (Amendment)(Definition of Extreme Pornography) Bill and is accompanied by a rather full explanatory note in the form of a blog which I commend to you.
As Lady Howe tells it there would have been no need for her new Bill if, during the last Parliament, the Government had stuck to its guns with the original version of the definition of prohibited material. But they didn’t.
There is no doubt matters got heated and confused towards the end of the previous discussions. How anyone could have thought there was even a possibility of anything in the (then) Digital Economy Bill cutting across the role or functions of the IWF is beyond me but when the General Election was called any possibility of resolving the issue satisfactorily flew straight out of the window.
Quite what will happen to Lady Howe’s new Bill as such we can only guess at. With the upcoming Internet Safety Strategy Review, the Digital Charter and all points North, South, East and West, not to mention Brexit, GDPR and the AVMSD we are all in for a busy time. However, in one form or another, the issues raised will have to be addressed so the sooner we do that the better it will be.
In her blog Lady Howe specifically refers to the issue of Computer Generated Images (CGI). Having seen some CGI in a war game recently I was absolutely convinced the characters were being played by human actors. They weren’t. They were CGI. Add to that the improvements in Augmented and Virtual Reality and we can see where the next wave of threats are coming from. We need to be ready yet, as of now, if these sorts of materials are housed on servers based overseas, for practical purposes nothing happens to them. They remain fully accessible within the UK. That is wrong and we need to put it right in the months ahead.
Desiderata 