England - Legal Situation

send me the $500 fee by paypal and I will get your liscense sent to you asap

no, its illegal.

There is no money in porn...

I've just been granted the ability to sell porn licenses in the UK. They currently cost £300 + 5% of gross earnings. If this is too high and you have a nice tight ass we may be able to come to a 'gentleman's agreement' and lower it a little

why do I even dare to ask a business related question here ?

this is not a fucking newbie question .. I run more paysites than you combined ..

It's a specific question regarding England as I remember reading something regarding a license to run a pon site in E N G L A N D ..

England is a country in Europe which is one of the continents .. I won't get into any more detail here .. might stress your iq ..

lol, think you're straining your own iq here

Running a porn site is fine, but hosting is just too expensive, UK webmasters host in the states and Holland, bandwith is mental prices, Ive been quoted $3.50/gigat best, but Ive never really shopped around

honestly...it is the question people would rather not talk about incase someone is listening and decides to deal with it for real and risk making a firm decission we don't want .

The hole gets deeper

Why on earth would running a few paysites make you incapable of 'asking a newbie question'. Asking if you need a license to produce porn online or offline in the UK IS a newbie question whatever way you look at it.

You should have been able to guess from the answers that no you don't. As for the legality it is a VERY grey area. To keep safe those more clued up never exceed the current R18 video guidelines and if sensible censor porn outside of the members area. The only successful prosecutions so far have been for stuff falling outside of the R18 guidelines ie people doing scat, beast CP etc etc.

Although privacy currently continues to be eroded in huge ways, thankfully porn laws/tolerance and those on very soft drugs are becoming more liberal so as yet little to worry about providing you do the above. However, anyone with half an ounce of sense who is UK based does need to monitor the situation closely in case it changes. The evil nutter who currently works as home secretary is rather fond of changing at a whim and targetting stuff he has little or no understanding of

I like her answer better than mine. Sums it up perfectly.

You come to GFY and ask a genuine business related question and then get upset when people give you a bit of a razzing?

Well you got three answers from people in the UK - I hope you listen to what they have to say because each of them have a lot of experience in the industry and each of them knows what they're talking about.

And none of them have to impress anyone by claiming that their paysite portfolio is bigger than yours or anyone else's.

I don't know anything for sure but as far as I understand it its illegal to upload uk illegal content to a server outside UK so you can't get round uk laws using a server outside uk.

What the uk laws are I am not sure exactly I think there are none related specifically to internet so there is no need for a license and whats legal comes down to whats not considered indecent and comes under the obscene publications act which is about 1000 years old.

People say if you stick within the BBFC R18 guidelines you will be ok.. It stands to reason they'd have a hard time convincing a jury its ok to do something on a video but not on the internet but then you don't know.

People say that the police are only interested in child porn, beastiality and stuff, I saw a scat case in the news before too. It seems reasonable they would only want to prosecute people doing fucked up stuff but then this is the UK and you just don't know.

This is a good site I just found:
http://www.allgo.free-online.co.uk/index.html

As I say the UK laws are very vague. The R18 doesn;t apply to the Internet at all but seems to most to be a sensible guide line. To be taken to court the CPS usually has to be fairly certain of a prosecution and if you are sensible then this would be far from certain and very costly for all involved so it is very unlikely they will do so.

Also as I mentioned, politics plays a HUGE part in it and at the moment our beloved blind guy and his US controlled puppet haven't got porn high on the agenda other than the obvious CP stuff (and rightly so for once). If this were to change it may be a different matter. Unlikely however as far too many of adult Internet surfers now indulge and enjoy online porn and it would quite possibly lose votes rather than gain them if they did target it. There have however been murmours concerning making the use of filtering software compulsory if minors are using the net. IMHO not a bad thing as every parent/school/whoever should be doing so anyway where kids are concerened.

As for your first point - yes. It matters not a jot where you host. If you upload or manage illegal sites from the UK expect to be in court (by illegal I'm obviously referring to blantly illegal stuff such as scat, beast, watersports (but not single girl pee which can now get R18 although I wouldn't risk it).

As I say thankfully we continue to become more liberal especially since the winning of the R18 court case. A decade ago though it may have been a different story. At least one ex-pat who visits this board has fallen foul of the obscenity laws in the less liberal past

oh and it is the U N I T E D K I N G D O M

not just England.

It' illegal. The punishment is deportation.

thank you very much ..