Realistically, what can the UK do to websites hosted outside the UK and run by people living outside the UK if they just let people from the UK freely visit such websites?
Sure, they might be able to block payments from UK-based bank accounts to non-UK digital marketplaces, but do they have any enforcement avenue against foreign sites that are just free to browse?
Of course, the concerning part is that I’ve heard the US, Australia, and others are considering similar laws.
Several American websites already chose to “comply” with the GDPR that way. There are many US websites (the ones I’ve encountered are usually local news websites) that just geoblock Europe.
I recently took over running textadventures.co.uk again, so I’m very much interested in how all this pans out.
There’s a lot of hot air and FUD around this, and it’s not helped by 450-page PDFs and confusion around extra requirements for the larger operators. But my sense (and very much non-legal opinion) is that for small platforms like ours, these regulations don’t impose anything onerous beyond what would be good common sense - e.g. have moderators check what gets uploaded, take down illegal content when users report it.
For now I’m tightening up access to “adult” games on textadventures.co.uk, but I was already in the process of that anyway - my own personal preference is I don’t want to be running a site with adult content on it thanks very much, and if I did, not just giving it away freely to minors seems… quite sensible?
I don’t blame the IFTF for taking a more cautious approach though, and as a charitable organisation they must have to deal with more compliance stuff than I do. I’ve never heard of a lawyer saying “don’t worry about that, it will probably be fine” either, so I think everybody is acting justifiably here. But my bet is that there shouldn’t be anything on the IF Archive that would fall foul of the rules, and if there was, it’s probably not content that IFTF wants on IF Archive anyway.
I know that laws don’t have to make sense to be enforced, but it does seem like if I can buy explicit prose from my local bookstore without showing ID, I shouldn’t be required to submit to background checks to download a text-only game with the same… (Games with images may be a different matter.)
And in the continued vein of being naive, I see that Newgrounds are hoping to do some “common sense” logic with their checks. E.g. my Intfiction account is over 17 years old, so can’t the forum infer from that that I’m over 18?
Yikes! (I am afraid to say more, the UK government might think I’m criticizing their laws.) Can I say I’m dumbfounded?
As a political scientist, I put my eyes on the confusion stemming from the lack of clarity and the ponderous 400+ page “explanations”; dunno in UK, but here in Italy, sometimes intentional confusion on application is the best approach in dealing with disagreeable “inherited laws” from the prior legislature.
in a nut: confusion → amendments → law more agreeable. ordinary administration here in Italy, but in UK ? I’ll watch and see…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Yeah, they do. The legislation empowers them to impose financial penalties on organizations that violate the law, which can in some circumstances also include joint liability for the individuals who control those organizations (like board members). These penalties are capped at £18 M or a percentage of the violator’s global revenues, whichever is greater; IFTF’s revenues are tiny, but even so a 10% hit would be hard to bear, much less a flat penalty not based on revenues.
If course, an organization can just ignore all this, and so long as they don’t have any assets in the UK and none of their board members live or travel there, that provides some insulation - foreign governments can go after US people and property in some specified cases, but they’re fairly restricted and I’m not an expert on them. But an additional enforcement power the regulators have is to request (UK) court orders to disrupt the operations of violators, which they specifically say can include ordering hosting services to take down or geoblock a site (and most hosting services are of course sufficiently big and international that they will be subject to a UK court order, I’d imagine).
It’s definitely the case that none of this is particularly likely - we’re a small fish. But the thing about complaint-based enforcement regimes like this is that it’s easy for them to respond not to size but to outrage. And without going into examples, it sure seems like there’s likely to be stuff on the Archive that could run afoul of the OSA’s content regulations (much of which IMO has significant artistic value and should stay there, to be clear!) Plus as mentioned, the IFTF is tiny and doesn’t have the resources to comply with even a token investigation without major disruptions to its operations, so drawing any kind of attention could easily be an existential threat.
Speaking as a UK person I’m very sad not to be able to access games in the IFArchive at the moment, and particularly concerned for IFComp etc incoming very soon. Luckily I’m not entering IFComp this year, but I had hoped to participate as a judge and reviewer, and at the moment am not sure I will even be able to play the entered games. I do hope to enter a game in the competition again next year.
Equally though I’m very sorry that IFTF are having to deal with all this. Though by the sound of things it seems as if other relevant and concerning legislation is likely from other countries in the not too distant future. So there is probably a wider issue to be considered.
I don’t think anyone is advocating for giving hardcore porn to minors. My issue with the law is that (1) all the approaches suggested to verify users’ ages are massive invasions of privacy, which will have awful consequences when (not if) it gets leaked, and (2) the definition of “adult” content is very easy to tweak to get rid of whatever content the current government doesn’t like. A significant part of the US is currently advocating to have anything mentioning queer people categorized as “adult”, for example, and Tumblr’s adult content ban famously deleted anything about birth control or suicide prevention, since those were considered inappropriate topics for minors.
Well, that’s the key, right? The point of an archive (as opposed to a library or such) is to preserve everything, even the things people find morally objectionable. I don’t think anyone would consider Stiffy Makane a great work of art, but given how many later works have riffed on it, imo it would be a significant loss to the IF world if it were purged. That’s the benefit of something like the IF Archive: its goal is to preserve as much IF as possible without editorial judgement.
(And I don’t think anything on the IF Archive is actually causing harm to people by its existence, which would be the main objection to that mission.)
Of course. Perfectly put. Modern power is primarily about language, so we dutifully internalise the expected behaviours (“The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “Thou art””).
Honestly, I have no objections to adolescents seeking out erotica and feel like I’d be a massive hypocrite if I did considering I used to be a 15, possibly even 14-year-old lying about my age to view such content back in highschool. Then again, I’m very much in the pro-sexual education camp, consider it child neglect if a girl only learns what a period is after she’s freaked out about blood in her underwear, consider abstinence-only sexual education adolescent abuse, and reckon most adolescents are safer indulging in self pleasure with some porn than they are experimenting with their peers with zero guidance.
Of course, in all likelihood, tech savvy teens will have less trouble circumventing whatever age verification schemes are implemented than the majority of legal adults will have in confirming their ages, so it’ll probably do little to counteract minors who want to see naked pictures because they’re horny and only encourage the ones seeking out such content because the adults said no…
Now, protecting minors… or anyone for that matter, from sexual predators(including protecting adults from underaged predators) is actually worthwhile, but I think we’ve established these laws are more about censorship than protection… and if anything, probably more likely to drive vulnerable individuals to sites that enable predators as less tech savvy users are forced off the safer sites.
Isn’t text exempt? Section 61. Actually I don’t know. There’s primary content, priority content and just content. Each seems to be different. That’s why I say this law is too confusing.
As Draconis says, queer content and sex ed topics were considered too “adult” for children and teenage end-users by websites. In the context of interactive fiction, I think a lot of Porpentine’s titles will go afoul with this new law since games like With Those We Love Alive explore sexual power dynamics.
And since many people, including myself, are inspired by Porpentine’s works, it makes us wonder if our games are going to be up on IFArchive and other websites. It doesn’t really matter if our work isn’t pornographic; the fact we’re exploring topics around sexuality and gender immediately places us in the realm of adult content in many people’s eyes, regardless of the actual target demographics.
From my own perspective, whenever I see a website that says they’re strict on adult content, I immediately read it as “not interested in queer content”. I get it: queer content can be notoriously hard to defend since some explore sexual taboos and fetishes that discomfort people. There’s also the payment processor stuff and the online safety acts to deal with too. It makes perfect sense for admins to not deal with “high-risk” content like that, even if they’re not trying to be queerphobic or anything.
But I still want websites and archives to upload to anyway. I’m planning to participate in IFComp, and the title can easily be construed as pornographic and tasteless in how it explores sexuality and gender. Still, I view it as my expression. Places like IFArchive and Itch are vital for queer expression, so I’m glad we’re having this discussion on how to figure this terrible law out.
Stiffy Makane is the perfect example. Is the original 1997 game a “great” work of art? Probably not by most definitions. Is it historically and culturally significant? Yes. Are other games in the Stiffy Makane lineage, like Mentula Macanus and Nemesis Macana, “great” works of art? Yes. Absolutely yes! Mentula Macanus is even “pornographic” – a word frequently weaponized to disparage artwork, as though pornography is inherently dangerous, inferior, and warrants a quarantine. Mentula Macanus is one of the greatest pieces of IF ever created. It’s up there in the pantheon of IF masterworks. And it is pornographic!
I agree with everything Kastel said, as well. Setting aside the value of legitimately pornographic games like Mentula Macanus, the charge “pornographic” is frequently and erroneously leveled at any queer artwork, as though the mere existence of non-heterosexual people is an affront to public decency. The suggestion that this legislation is “quite sensible” has me rather rankled, to describe my mood mildly.
Finally I have found something definitive.
Page 8 here states that text-only content (and user-generated content) are excluded from the age verification requirements.
That link says that text-only content and user-generated content are not pornography for the purposes of Part 5 of the Act, which covers regulations on websites whose primary purpose is to provide pornography. But Part 5 isn’t the part the IFTF will be concerned about in relation to the IF Archive.
What content is the IFTF concerned about then, if it’s not content that is required to be age restricted? I thought that was what this entire thread was about.
You’re reading the wrong part of the act. Part 3 places requirements on all online services that could potentially be accessed by children in the UK, and covers a wider range of content than pornographic images.
I’m just saying it appears there’s no need to age gate text based porn.
I believe you are correct that games which contain text-only sex scenes do not need to be age restricted under the OSA. This doesn’t resolve the problem because: