This week, the new law on extreme porn went live throughout the UK (except Scotland). Hopes in some quarters that this law would prove a panacea to the nastier end of internet kinkiness were dashed last week when ACPO announced that they would not be actively policing it.
All change, however, as an organisation calling itself extremeporn.org.uk mails The Register to announce that if the government won’t do it, they will. A slightly topsy-turvy argument on its homepage states:
We believe that the law should be enforced; not doing so breeds laziness and impreciseness in the legislature, lack of inspection of the law outside of the legislature, increased power of the executive due to selective enforcement and permits many people guilty – of a crime, if nothing else – to get away Scot-free … This is bad for everyone.
Some more explanation of what it plans to do is contained a little further into the site. They claim that they will primarily categorise and monitor torrents. Once a torrent has been added to their system, they will periodically poll the tracker for peer IPs and then use GeoIP technology to identify UK-based IPs. Where a match is found, the system will, in principle, email the abuse contact for that IP. (This is where extremeporn’s claims become a little vague: they seem to be agreeing, however, that there are practical issues with this stage of the process.)
They claim already to have filed more abuse reports than the Government planned to prosecute in an entire year.
…See Extreme porn vigilantes are after you from theregister.co.uk by John Ozimek
Original legislation: Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008
