UK Film Censors look to Internet
The UK Film Classification body, the BBFC, are responsible for ensuring films in the UK are released with an appropriate certification, and now they are asking the UK Goverment to allow them to begin classifying the Internet.
According to PC Pro, a leading PC magazine, the British Board of Film Classification...
wants the authority to rate videos for language, violence, sex and themes, in the same way that it already does for films, videos and DVDs.
'We don't want to go down the route of cutting and banning things and blocking sites, but a lot of the content that's out there on the internet is not something the majority of people would want to view,' said BBFC spokeswoman Sue Clark. 'If there's some sort of standardised labelling system that people understand, then they know that it's material they can trust.'
The article has some quite sensible comments from the BBFC, saying that they can't stop video on the Internet, but at least if it carried the correct certification that people would be aware.
That's a great idea, but hits the same brick wall as it would if they were trying to censor it. A video that's sitting on an east European server is not required to display the certificate, obviously because it's outside the UK, so how are they going to enforce a certificate on that?