back to article UK e-tailers scurry to scrap dodgy Heavy Metal covers

UK e-tailers are scrambling to remove images of the Scorpions Virgin Killer album which led the Internet Watch Foundation to ban much of Wikipedia yesterday. The IWF claimed the article, and artwork, on Wikipedia were child pornography and added the URL to its banned list distributed to most UK Internet Service Providers. But …

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  1. Colin Mountford
    Go

    I have a cunning plan...

    Maybe we can turn this to our advantage.

    How about submitting these depictions to the IWF of men lusting after school age children.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Trinian's

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_On_Camping

    Although no images are available on Wiki. I'm sure the actual film images available on Youtube et al. would have the IWF frothing at the mouth.

    At the same time we can reduce the number of Christmas repeats by forcing the BBC to not show them. If the IWF have banned them then how can BBC show them. Sorted..

    Now if only I could get Chitty Chitty Bang Bang banned. Let's think...

    Environmentally unfriendly flying car - tick

    Children - tick

    Adults abusing children by locking them up - tick

    Weird bloke who sniffs children - BINGO!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Someone had to say it..

    It's PAEDO-GEDDON!

    Sorry, feel better now that's out of my system.

    - The Invisible Opera Company

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    It's Spinal Tap all over again

    Do you suppose that the IWF should have a look at the cover image for Smell the Glove, or Bitch School.

    After all, there's no guarantee that the women portrayed are over 18....

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    John Carr on Channel 4

    @Mike Richards

    So, you saw John Carr on Channel 4 too eh?

    When he appeared with his arguments on UKCrypto some years ago, he found he couldn't argue against many of the people there and so took away his ball to play with it elsewhere.

    Now he's in some nice cushy pro-child charity, and they get tax breaks for this stuff!

    Unamused!

  5. Simp
    Paris Hilton

    Wikipedia from 6 IPs?

    Hypothetically, since a lot of wikipedia's traffic now comes spoofed from the ISP; wouldn't it be really easy for a real paedophile to go and post some indecent images on the site and never get found? How has the action of the IWF helped in any way apart from to shape our narrow mindedness in to no mindedness?

    Political correctness has more of an opinion about what's right and wrong in the west than the actual people who live there! We're too busy getting the next round in at the pub. On a major note though, the Internet is all about freedom of information; now wikipedia (and lots of uni students :( ) are suffering because of some dictator like clowns acting on behalf of my safety.

    Paris because: she looks about as old as the kid on the album art thanks to make-up

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    RE Voodoo Children All Growed Up.

    I think the original cover for Electric Ladyland has been replaced for quite a while now (at least in the UK).

  7. Andy
    Stop

    Futility and stupidity

    Dammit - I posted my comment on the wrong page !

    I accidentally put it on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/09/iwf_wikipedia_ban/

    It was meant to be here...

    The idea behind the IWF is fine (in theory) but the trouble is in the implementation. This album cover can be viewed on many sites - should every single URL be blocked ? If the IWF were to apply their criteria properly then yes.

    This would mean blocking Google, Yahoo, Amazon and most search engines that display images - as well as blocking specific pages from other sites (eg a certain site that has this album as #1 worst cover of all time !).

    Blocking the Wiki page has had VERY unintended side effects - inability for UK editors to amend pages - what might happen if Google / Yahoo pages were blocked ?

    Also we have the issue of only some ISPs being blocked as others appear not to be signed up to the IWF's list.

    The attempt to ban the image from the UK , while fine in principle, has not worked. Nor can it work without banning the sites mentioned above by all ISPs. Without too much effort I could probably find 100 unique pages with the album cover on it - there are probably many hundreds - ban them all ?

    The idea of "ban a page if it might possibly be dodgy" is ill thought out. Don't get me wrong - the basic idea of the IWF seems fine - but in this case it seems it cannot possibly ban all pages that contain this image. Therefore it should ban none.

    Did I go and have a look at the image ? Yes.

    Does this make me a criminal now ? I really don't know - that might depend on which site I saw it on, which ISP I happened to use, whether I use a proxy server etc. It seems woefully messed up.

    What did I think of the image ? Pretty tasteless - even for heavy rock 30 years ago in Germany !

  8. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Thumb Up

    Little stickers anyone?

    Back in the eighties Tipper Gore and the PMRC managed to nag the US government and record labels until they finally got those silly "May contain explicit lyrics!" stickers on any half decent album.

    Net result, every band deliberately put an f-word in their music just so they would have to have a sticker on their CD, because the bands and record company knew that any album with a silly PMRC sticker on the front would sell X amount more than one without! It completely backfired on those PMRC knobs!

    Let's just see if that comes about, this time around!

    While we're at it, can we ban Scorpion's Blackout as well, I might come home one day and find my kids are trying ram forks into their eyes.

    Let's ban Celtic Frost's Emperor's Return, I might find people trying to dress up in S&M gear while attracting the attention of large green monsters!

    Ban anything by Girls Aloud and the Pussycat Dolls, the covers I can handle, it's the "music" that's just utter, putrid shite!

  9. blue
    Stop

    A Black & White Issue

    I seem to remember a lot of naked children being portrayed in National Geographic and in documentaries of Africa. Even the film Powaqqatsi by Godfrey Reggio has a young African boy splashing through water, tiny penis bobbing in time to the Philip Glass score.

    Surely a case for a ban! A good old-fashioned book and film burnin'!

    Unless, of course, we're just protecting the white children?

    Or is it more that digital media is being discriminated against, whereas 'old' media is given a free pass.

  10. Danny

    The best kiddie-porn I ever saw...

    .. was the Polish movie 'The Crows' which has several scenes of childhood nudity. I saw it earlier this year at the '81/2' film festival Nairn that Tilda Swinton organised and which every highbrow newspaper website covered, surrounded by an audience of enrapt kids and pensioners. It is about a nine year old girl who kidnaps a three year old girl to be her mother because there is no love in her life. I'm sure anyone who wasn't left in angst about the passage of life by the end was fumbling in their pants at the back. Maybe more to Max Mosleys tastes would be the movie 'Shoah', the longer version clearly shows underage girls stripping just before they enter the gas-chambers.

    What could be hotter than the footage of third world peasant girls covered in napalm?

    I think this story is a symptom of a deeper malaise, British and US hangups about nudity and sexuality that have been lampooned for a long time in saner societies but it is no joke now. We could fly to the land of the sauna, where everyone happily sweats nude in mixed groups including mixed age-groups, and we'd learn learn something too since Finland has a lower level of child-abuse than we do.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: it is not child porn

    "research has now been produced that the female in the picture was 16 when the picture was taken that makes her of the age of consent so not kiddie porn at all"

    a) in terms of porn, she has to be 18 now (regardless of what the law was at the time). Age of consent relates to having sex, not appearing naked in a photo.

    b) UK porn law now also forbids images of anyone who is portrayed to be younger than the legal age even if they are above it, as well as artwork/cartoons and computer generated images that are supposed to be of children.

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