Cross porn shops raided

BY JOHN MOYLE

Last week NSW police carried out raids on the remaining three Kings Cross shops selling erotic material.

While all owners declined to comment on the operations, it is believed that a large number of DVDs were removed from each of the premises.
Without any comment from the owners, it can only be surmised that the police were looking for DVDs that fell outside the range of legal porn, and would have been unmarked or marked as X18+, which are legal for sale or hire in the ACT and NT, but illegal in all other states.

If you legally want any porn in this category, then you need to order from an ACT or NT site and make PayPal and Australia Post complicit in getting your illicit porn out of the territories and into your hard drive.
In the era of internet porn, which has few borders, or none if you use a VPN or TOR, few of us give a thought as to what is legal and illegal to possess on the little silver disks.

DVD porn laws in Australia vary between states, but all are subject to classification under the Department of Communication and the Arts and fall into the categories of general for films and computer games, restricted for films and computer games and restricted categories for adult films, with the title being marked as X18+.
There is also another category known as RC, or refused classification.

This is material commonly referred to as ‘banned’ and covers films, computer games and publications that fall outside generally accepted community standards and cannot be legally sold, hired or imported into Australia.
Most adult shops will carry a range of DVDs catering for tastes ranging from soft to hard core porn, with the latter covering gay and all its sub categories such as bear, twink and group sex, straight, which is mostly anal these days, trans, granny, gang bangs and jailbait, a borderline category where the production company vouches that all actors are over 18.

Australia produces very little video porn, either gay or straight, though for a few years Canberra was a bountiful location for Abby Winters’ reality-based soft-core lesbian porn shoots.
Most video porn comes into Australia under licence from the US and is copied, packaged and distributed here.
In Australia there are three major distributors and the margins are so low there is very little incentive for them to openly flout the law and face massive fines and/or prison sentences.

For many years the major focus from the authorities has concerned child pornography, and there is no evidence that adult shops engage in this in any way.
Most child porn enters the country via the internet or is smuggled on hard drives and USB sticks before being circulated among a tight network of low-lifes that operate outside of any mainstream network, and certainly not adult shops.

Video may have killed the radio star, but the internet surely killed the little silver disk.
For years now, most people have sourced their porn over the net as it’s quicker, cheaper and the variety is endless.
A quick look at YouPorn brings up 75 categories of straight sex, plus a 3D site, while PornHub has 42 categories of gay sex, and most of it free or by a small subscription.

But not all surfing on the net is freestyle; it has its own dangers, not the least being that often after visiting an online porn site you will find you are spammed by offers to download hard drive cleaners the moment you log off.

And despite the internet being touted as being an environment without boundaries, it reality it does have fences with large “Trespassers Beware” signs.
This is a difficult area, because, as the surfer, the onus is on you to determine what may or may not be deemed offensive and there is little public education as to where the boundaries are.
In Australia some online content is prohibited under Australian law if it is deemed offensive or illegal, and this covers websites, forums, peer-to-peer networks and live streaming.

The only guidelines that the lone surfer can use are the same ones that the Classification Board use for a X18+ rating, covering depiction of sexual activity between adults; videos showing high impact violence; footage detailing offensive sexual practices such as bestiality; and material providing detailed instruction in crime.

In all Australian states and territories it is illegal to access or distribute child-exploitation material and extremist material such as articles, speeches, blogs or videos encouraging hate, content encouraging acts of terrorism, terrorist training material, websites created or hosted by terrorists, content regarding the use or sale of chemicals, and videos of terrorist attacks.

ACORN, the Australian CyberCrime Online Reporting Network, advises that you should not search any of these subjects online, even if the search is conducted in good faith.

Wow! After all that it might be easier to drop down to the local adult shop and buy that little silver disk.
Now, if only the police would bring back the DVDs.