Policing Popslash?
This is... interesting. In the process of perusing the net earlier I came across this news article, which is actually from July, but I think it certainly warrants a post. Some of you in the UK may have already heard about this.
The main subject is a violent fanfic written about a girl group, which I'm not familiar with, but it goes on to discuss recent obscenity laws, including some interesting statistics. It's rather long, but do read the whole thing if you get a chance.
How to police popslash
This week the case against the author of Girls (Scream) Aloud, a violent rape fantasy was dropped - further evidence that existing obscenity laws have no teeth. But would we have it any other way?
It started with Star Trek fans writing stories about a Kirk/Spock love affair, and it quickly became a craze. Fantasy fiction, or "fanfic" websites now attract contributions from large numbers of obsessive fans, and new genres are emerging at a remarkable rate: "slash" fanfic focuses on gay relationships (the Lord of the Rings characters provide particularly fertile ground), with "femslash" for lesbian characters; and then there's "real person popslash", where the unlucky subjects are celebrities in the music business.
One popslash fantasy came to public attention this week when, most unusually, its author found himself in court. Darryn Walker's writing is darker than most. The 35-year-old former civil servant's story, a 12-page article called "Girls (Scream) Aloud", depicted the kidnap, rape and murder of each member of girl band Girls Aloud by their coach driver.
The story was spotted by the Daily Star first, and then the Internet Watch Foundation, the internet regulatory body, which in turn notified the police. Walker's home was raided by Scotland Yard, and last October he was charged under the Obscene Publications Act - a 1959 law which hasn't been used against written material since the attempt to prosecute the publishers of Inside Linda Lovelace, a biography of a porn star, in 1976. The jury in that trial were unwisely told that if the book was not obscene, "nothing was" and showed their contempt for this argument by returning a verdict of not guilty. Shortly afterwards, the Williams report on obscenity and censorship recommended that similar cases should not be pursued in future.
To many, this was a victory for freedom of expression. "Lady Chatterley achieved freedom for great literature," says Geoffrey Robertson QC, who defended numerous notorious obscenity cases, including the trials of underground magazine Oz, with John Mortimer. "The Oz trials achieved freedom for not very great literature. And the Inside Linda Lovelace trial achieved final freedom for the written word."
Which, experts say, makes the decision to prosecute Walker for Girls (Scream) Aloud so surprising. "Ever since the Williams report, the notion of "obscene printed material is a contradiction in terms," says John Sutherland, a professor and expert on literary censorship and offensiveness who gave evidence in the Walker case...
...But why prosecute, when there are so many graphic stories on the web? David Perry QC, the prosecuting barrister in the case, argued that: "[This article] was accessible to ... young people who were interested in a particular pop music group. It was this that distinguished this case from other material."
However, earlier this week the case was abandoned, when Walker's defence team produced evidence that Girls (Scream) Aloud did not pose a significant threat to the group's young fans...
...The sparse attempts to prosecute material since the 1979 Williams report confirms the fact that it is now very difficult to get results using existing obscenity law, experts say. The first ever CD prosecution, against rap group NWA, resulted in an acquittal at Redbridge magistrates court in 1991 when magistrates decided that tracks such as One Less Bitch or To Kill a Hooker, did not incite sexual violence, but simply reflected the depravity of street life in Los Angeles. Thirty thousand records, cassettes and CDs that had been seized by Scotland Yard's obscene publications squad were ordered to be released.
And the last high-profile attempt to achieve a conviction for written material failed in 1998 when the director of public prosecutions declined to prosecute Picador for publishing American Psycho, the Brett Easton Ellis novel depicting explicit killings of women.
Walker's case was the first attempt to prosecute internet fanfic, and it looks likely to be the last. "Most fiction remains fenced in by libel, copyright and other constraints," says Sutherland. "But fanfic is interesting because it is fiction without frontiers. And it is free."....
Policing Popslash
Reading this made me a bit uncomfortable, honestly. I mean, I certainly don't write violent material such as this, but I do like to ignore the fact that I write things about real people. That's something I don't like admitting to myself, honestly. And I don't watch porn (unless explicit fanfic counts as porn?) but when it comes to obscenity law I'm firmly in the "liberal" camp. Seeing what warranted judicial action as "obscene" in the last century is rather amusing, and I think shows just how subjective this whole issue is. Although this article does raise an interesting point about women's rights, which I actually hadn't considered before. As I understand it, the atmosphere is very different in Europe than in the States, so maybe some of you have different opinions. But I can't help feeling there's a difference between respecting the right to free speech, and actually being the one writing the fanfic, and I haven't figured out how to deal with that yet.
The main subject is a violent fanfic written about a girl group, which I'm not familiar with, but it goes on to discuss recent obscenity laws, including some interesting statistics. It's rather long, but do read the whole thing if you get a chance.
How to police popslash
This week the case against the author of Girls (Scream) Aloud, a violent rape fantasy was dropped - further evidence that existing obscenity laws have no teeth. But would we have it any other way?
It started with Star Trek fans writing stories about a Kirk/Spock love affair, and it quickly became a craze. Fantasy fiction, or "fanfic" websites now attract contributions from large numbers of obsessive fans, and new genres are emerging at a remarkable rate: "slash" fanfic focuses on gay relationships (the Lord of the Rings characters provide particularly fertile ground), with "femslash" for lesbian characters; and then there's "real person popslash", where the unlucky subjects are celebrities in the music business.
One popslash fantasy came to public attention this week when, most unusually, its author found himself in court. Darryn Walker's writing is darker than most. The 35-year-old former civil servant's story, a 12-page article called "Girls (Scream) Aloud", depicted the kidnap, rape and murder of each member of girl band Girls Aloud by their coach driver.
The story was spotted by the Daily Star first, and then the Internet Watch Foundation, the internet regulatory body, which in turn notified the police. Walker's home was raided by Scotland Yard, and last October he was charged under the Obscene Publications Act - a 1959 law which hasn't been used against written material since the attempt to prosecute the publishers of Inside Linda Lovelace, a biography of a porn star, in 1976. The jury in that trial were unwisely told that if the book was not obscene, "nothing was" and showed their contempt for this argument by returning a verdict of not guilty. Shortly afterwards, the Williams report on obscenity and censorship recommended that similar cases should not be pursued in future.
To many, this was a victory for freedom of expression. "Lady Chatterley achieved freedom for great literature," says Geoffrey Robertson QC, who defended numerous notorious obscenity cases, including the trials of underground magazine Oz, with John Mortimer. "The Oz trials achieved freedom for not very great literature. And the Inside Linda Lovelace trial achieved final freedom for the written word."
Which, experts say, makes the decision to prosecute Walker for Girls (Scream) Aloud so surprising. "Ever since the Williams report, the notion of "obscene printed material is a contradiction in terms," says John Sutherland, a professor and expert on literary censorship and offensiveness who gave evidence in the Walker case...
...But why prosecute, when there are so many graphic stories on the web? David Perry QC, the prosecuting barrister in the case, argued that: "[This article] was accessible to ... young people who were interested in a particular pop music group. It was this that distinguished this case from other material."
However, earlier this week the case was abandoned, when Walker's defence team produced evidence that Girls (Scream) Aloud did not pose a significant threat to the group's young fans...
...The sparse attempts to prosecute material since the 1979 Williams report confirms the fact that it is now very difficult to get results using existing obscenity law, experts say. The first ever CD prosecution, against rap group NWA, resulted in an acquittal at Redbridge magistrates court in 1991 when magistrates decided that tracks such as One Less Bitch or To Kill a Hooker, did not incite sexual violence, but simply reflected the depravity of street life in Los Angeles. Thirty thousand records, cassettes and CDs that had been seized by Scotland Yard's obscene publications squad were ordered to be released.
And the last high-profile attempt to achieve a conviction for written material failed in 1998 when the director of public prosecutions declined to prosecute Picador for publishing American Psycho, the Brett Easton Ellis novel depicting explicit killings of women.
Walker's case was the first attempt to prosecute internet fanfic, and it looks likely to be the last. "Most fiction remains fenced in by libel, copyright and other constraints," says Sutherland. "But fanfic is interesting because it is fiction without frontiers. And it is free."....
Policing Popslash
Reading this made me a bit uncomfortable, honestly. I mean, I certainly don't write violent material such as this, but I do like to ignore the fact that I write things about real people. That's something I don't like admitting to myself, honestly. And I don't watch porn (unless explicit fanfic counts as porn?) but when it comes to obscenity law I'm firmly in the "liberal" camp. Seeing what warranted judicial action as "obscene" in the last century is rather amusing, and I think shows just how subjective this whole issue is. Although this article does raise an interesting point about women's rights, which I actually hadn't considered before. As I understand it, the atmosphere is very different in Europe than in the States, so maybe some of you have different opinions. But I can't help feeling there's a difference between respecting the right to free speech, and actually being the one writing the fanfic, and I haven't figured out how to deal with that yet.