Censor Watch

Licensing authorities will be able to continue charging for the cost of enforcement but may have to change how they do it, following a ruling by the Supreme Court.

The case, involving Westminster City Council and sex shop owner Timothy Hemming, had threatened to prevent councils charging anything more than the cost of processing a licensing application. This prevented the council from charging legal shops to pay for the cost of closing unlicensed premises that are nothing to do with the fee paying shops.

In May 2013 the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of Hemming who had successfully argued that charging for the cost of enforcement was inconsistent with European law.

However, Westminster appealed and a Supreme Court ruling handed down this morning overturned this decision. The judgment said:

There is no reason why [a licensing fee] should not be set at a level enabling the authority to recover from licensed operators the full cost of running and enforcing the licensing scheme, including the costs of enforcement and proceedings against those operating sex establishments without licences.

The court said its decision followed interventions from interested parties including the Treasury, the Local Government Association and the Law Society.

Hemming had also argued that it was not legitimate for Westminster to charge the full cost of licence on application, which was £29,435 in 2011-12, even though the bulk of this fee, £26,435, was refundable if the application was unsuccessful. The Supreme Court did not rule on this point but has referred the matter to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. It is not likely to rule for at least a year.

The Motion Picture Association has obtained a High Court order requiring UK ISPs to block access to five sites that offer the popular Popcorn Time software. In addition, the Internet providers must block several more torrent and streaming sites.

More than 100 websites have been blocked in recent years and now the court has issued the first injunction against domains that offer no direct links, but only software.

The order, obtained by Hollywood's Motion Picture Association (the overseas arm of the MPAA), targets five popular Popcorn Time forks: popcorntime.io, flixtor.me, popcorn-time.se, and isoplex.isohunt.to.

In his order Judge Birss notes that the Popcorm Time software has little to no legal use. Instead, he mentions that it's mostly used to download and stream pirated movies and TV-shows:

It is manifest that the Popcorn Time application is used in order to watch pirated content on the internet and indeed it is also manifest that that is its purpose. No-one really uses Popcorn Time in order to watch lawfully available content. The point of Popcorn Time is to infringe copyright. The Popcorn Time application has no legitimate purpose.

Over the past year Popcorn Time has become a major threat to Hollywood so it doesn't come as a complete surprise that the applications are now being targeted. Previously the movie studios took down code repositories on Github, for example.

Ukip have reported Have I Got News For You to police over a comment made about Nigel Farage. However commentators have noted that the disputed comments about Farage came after 13 minutes of mocking the Tories, Labour, Lib Dem and SNP campaigns.

The complaint arose from last Friday's edition when journalist Camilla Long spoke about visiting Farage's constituency of South Thanet in Kent. She said:

I went there more than Nigel Farage. By the time I arrived there he'd only been a few times.

When asked by Ian Hislop whether she thought Ukip would win the seat, Long replied:

I don't think they are, I don't think he's going to get a seat at all.

Speaking to Nick Ferrari on LBC, Farage said:

Even through to a programme on Have I Got News For You last week where comments were made about an individual in a constituency, namely me, that I just don't think would have been said about any other candidate in the country.'

According to ITV Nnews, Ukip's advisors claimed the comments were inaccurate and that their broadcast breached the Representation of the People Act.

Kent Police confirmed they received a complaint, but said they would not be launching an investigation. A spokesman told Chortle:

Kent Police received a complaint regarding comments made on a television broadcast last week. It was suggested that the comments breached the Representation of the People Act. The matter has been reviewed by officers but there's no evidence of any offences and there will be no further action.

A Turkish filmmaker and a group of activists staged a protest outside the German consulate in Istanbul on Wednesday over the German customs confiscation of the tapes of a Turkish documentary sent to Germany.

Serkan Koç is the director of 1915 Belgeseli ( The Story of 1915 in Armenian Documents ), a documentary arguing that the mass deaths of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I was not a genocide as Armenia claims. He told reporters that politically motivated customs officials recently seized the tapes of his documentary. He said it was openly censorship and clearly an intervention to freedom of expression and thought in Europe.

Koç had shipped the documentary to the German parliament and several dignitaries. He said:

The documentary defends Turkey's stance and it had all the legal documents required for its shipping to Germany. Still, German customs officials ignored that and focused instead on the documentary's content. They were clearly politically motivated, as they said they would watch the film first to check its content.

Koç claimed it was a reflection of the German parliament's stance on the issue. The German parliament last week had defined the deaths of the Armenians as "genocide" to the chagrin of Turkey, which contends that the deaths were the result of diseases and an arduous journey during the war. He added:

It runs against the values of Europe. The German public has a right to see what happened in 1915 from our perspective as well. The confiscation is a sign of double-standards.

A poster, which appeared on the corner of Brick Lane and Hanbury Street in London, featured model Cara Delevingne lying naked on her front, the side of her breast and buttocks visible. She was holding a bottle of Tom Ford Black Orchid perfume.

1. One complainant challenged whether the ad was inappropriate for display where children could see it and where it was close to churches and mosques.

2. Another complainant challenged whether the ad was offensive because they believed it was degrading and objectified women.

ASA Assessment: Complaints not upheld

1. Not upheld

The ASA noted the ad featured an image of Cara Delevigne in which she was clearly naked and lying on her side in water, with much of one of her breasts shown along with the profile of her buttocks. Despite her nudity we considered her pose was sensual and sexually suggestive but that it was not sexually explicit. We therefore considered that because the image was sexually suggestive, it should not have appeared within 100 m of a school. We understood the ad in question did not have a placement restriction but equally noted it had not been placed in a location within 100 m of a school and that a placement restriction was subsequently unnecessary in this instance.

We understood that because of its size and location on a busy urban street, the ad would be very noticeable to passersby and that attention would be drawn to the poster space regardless of its content and that in this case it may have been more noticeable because the model was clearly naked. However, we noted the ad did not appear within the immediate vicinity of a place of worship and that the area in question was a busy, diverse and popular area of London. We therefore considered the ad had not been placed inappropriately.

2. Not upheld

We noted the pose was sensual. Although the model was naked, we considered the image was not sexually explicit. We further noted the image was stylised and artistic and in-keeping with ads for beauty products such as perfumes where depictions of feminine beauty and the female body were commonly used. Whilst we understood some viewers may have found the image distasteful because of the nudity shown and implied, we considered the image itself was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence and that it did not degrade or objectify women.

The Labour Party made a very worrying policy announcement that was hardly noticed by the media: Labour would outlaw Islamophobia , said Ed Miliband in an interview.

The proposals are fairly nebulous at this point: Ed says he intends to make Islamophobia an aggravated crime and toughen existing hate crime legislation . Defenders of freedom of speech should be alarmed at this, because Labour has dangerous previous form in exactly this area: the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006.

What Ed is proposing looks like a return to finish the 2006 act. In 2006 Labour originally tried to criminalise deliberately insulting a religion. Those opposed to that law argued that it would become a criminal offence mock a religion, or to say that a religion damages British society, because in doing so they would be accused of inciting religious hatred *. There was a huge public out-cry, led by academics, artists, writers and comedians (notably Rowan Atkinson), and in the end the Labour government was defeated by a single vote and the law was watered down. Ed Miliband personally voted for the original wording.

Such oppressive laws are two edged. Not only do they deny people free speech, but they also provide weapons to bullies and aggressive people by allowing them to accuse people of islamophobia.

Lets face it, the need to criticise religion is massively important, unchecked religions have spawned some of the nastiest regimes known to mankind.

Student Union censors and university chaplains ordered a sketch featuring Mohammed cut from a student comedy show, because it supposedly caused great offence.

Bath Impact , the student newspaper, reports that union officials said the censorship decision had been taken to maintain the inclusivity of the university and to avoid complaints. However, it has emerged that chaplains were involved in the Union's decision, and that they had denounced the scene as graphic and offensive.

The Comedy Writing, Improvisation and Performance Society (CWIPS) staged a performance called The Bible According to CWIPS . But just four hours before the opening night a union official who attended a rehearsal told the society that a sketch depicting the religious character Mohammed, called Cooking With Christ , had to be cut from the show.

The Chaplaincy is said to have described the cut sketch as extreme , but the organisers commented that they had:

Worked very hard in order to make sure [the] material was enjoyable and pleasant for people of all faiths and background.

NSS president Terry Sanderson said:

This is another example of Islamic blasphemy codes being normalised. The decision taken assumes that Muslim students would have been offended, and takes that as a sufficient reason to curtail the students' artistic expression.

It is also very troubling to see 'inclusivity' being used as a spurious reason to shut down parts of the performance. It is telling that only material related to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed was cut. There is an atmosphere of hysteria around satirising or criticising Islam, particularly since the Charlie Hebdo attack. We must start reclaiming ground from those who would silence free expression and satire.

Myles Jackman has played a high profile part in defending victims of Britain's repressive obscenity laws. He has now launched a new website which may be the first port of call for anyone that falls foul of UK censorship laws.

New technology developed by US researchers can transmit messages through popular multiplayer online games, making it very difficult for censors to detect and block.

One of the most difficult tasks faced by those attempting to subvert internet restrictions , such as those put in place by China's so-called Great Firewall, is doing so in a manner that doesn't provoke suspicion from censors. Rishab Nithyanand, a researcher at Stony Brook University and one of the developers of The Castle explained:

People who were using [anonymising tools] were fairly easily detected by censors and blocked.

The Castle uses video games as a benign transport, transmitting and receiving data through the game itself in a manner that will just look like normal gameplay from the outside.

We can basically transmit any kind of information through the video game.

Games already transmit huge amounts of data between players and servers, and between players themselves. This data is usually encrypted to prevent cheating, making it hard for censors to spot anything suspicious.

The technology, which was published on the code repository GitHub last week, is built to use 0AD , an open-source, multiplayer real-time strategy game. The technology could easily be adapted to a similar title, such as Starcraft or the hugely-popular Dota series.