UK Online Safety Act

Ofcom, the UK government communication services regulator, are implementing the “Online Safety Act”, a new law that is meant to protect children from accessing pornographic content online.

This law requires websites offering pornography to have stringent age checking verification for each and every user in place.

I don’t know if you have ever done this. I have. When we joined a dating site, my man and I had to make a little video to become “verified” users. We had to hold up our passports showing our names, ages and nationalities, to prove we were who we are. I was dubious, it felt strangely invasive, giving away your true identity to a database somewhere.

Sundial is non profit making. I have not made any money at all writing my blog. Not even the costs of the domain name, audio or website hosting are covered. I absolutely love doing it, and that’s why I do it. I love that what I write can bring someone I’ll never meet who lives somewhere I’ll never visit a bit of sexy joy. Sometimes it just occurs to me like a full blown and completely unexpected slap in the face, and I find myself grinning with absolute, excited delight. But, because I don’t make any money, I cannot afford to add the type of age verification required by this new act to my website.

A small amount of the content I offer falls under the remit of this new law:

“The Act defines pornographic content as content that was produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal. This only includes audio, image and video content. It does not include text or written content.”

All of my audio and perhaps three images are affected. My writing and most of the pictures I’ve published are just fine though.

Girl on the Net wrote to me to let me know that the audio content I made together with her is affected. In order to comply with the new law, she is no longer able to offer UK IP address based users this type of content. This includes the audio embedded from her posts on my site. Here is a link to her site, explaining why this has had to happen.

She raises a really valid and important issue here. “Isn’t the whole point of the audio to make erotica accessible to blind people?” It makes me wonder about the validity of the law. If your audio-content is meant to make your written content (which is not affected by this law) accessible to a minority group, shouldn’t it then remain legal to be able to do this?

I feel sad about this and I’m very sorry to do it. I am going to have to cut my self-produced audio from my site completely, at least until I can figure out a way to stop the UK IP address based users from being able to access the audio content. Thanks to Girl on the Net, my audio on our collaborated pieces will stay live on my site, as they should be inaccessible to UK IP addresses.

I’ll also be deleting my tits.