I wasn’t going to mention this at all, but seeing some of my fellow Brits so upset and a few of my members wondering what is happening, I thought I’d answer a few of their questions and make a brief comment on this overall. I am now only going through some mails as I have been rather busy these past few days and have told each member that has written to me that as far as I am concerned it is business as usual and I won’t be intimidated or bullied by crass ignorant law makers.
I will post a brief message inside the members area later today – as far as I am concerned, the new laws will not affect the website – as I am here in the USA right now drawing up papers with an attorney to transfer all operations to Sarah Gregory’s US based company with immediate effect (on my return to the UK I will be informing my accountants of the decision and looking at the best and easiest way to wind up my UK operations. Basically, Sarah Gregory’s company will operate Triple A within her group of sites. What does that mean? I will NOT be answerable to the ridiculous and pathetic regulations approved of on December 1st in the UK. The only thing I have bowed down to is removing the ability of UK debit cards to process transactions via CCBill (for the moment) – which is rather bloody annoying as I have had several rejected sign ups since I voluntarily decided on doing this. I apologize to my British readership and prospective members – as it would appear that all 16 and 17 year olds feel the need to pay for their porn with debit cards according to ATVOD and the learned Department of “Culture, Media and Sport” (I won’t deem them with a link right now) . I polled my nephews on this and they laughed… as I suspected, when they were of this age not too long ago, they used all manner of tube and piracy sites to get their porn fixes or music/Hollywood films for free.
To say how ashamed I am to be British in the light of this repressive and damaging regulations (What will be next in line for censorship? Who will test case this? How will this portray women and damaging mainstream mysoginistic porn) I won’t waste any more of my time on this – I have a meeting with the attorney tomorrow and of course this will affect me personally, it is not a decision I took lightly.
So to repeat: What does this mean to my members right now? Nothing, AAA Spanking carries on as normal – all films made before Dec 1st have been fully edited (in the US I might add) and are already loaded onto my servers which have always been based in the USA as I never fully trusted the UK and how right I was! I will still continue to promote the site wherever I am… I spend time in the UK and USA (and other countries) but after this tax year will no longer contribute legally to the UK and will look to staying more permanently in the US long term. It may not be much – but I feel sad that this decision has been forced on me by sheer ignorance and it really hurts as a British citizen who wanted to remain legal and contribute to the country of my birth! Now any profit and taxes from that will go to another country and my accountant who I love will no longer get payment from me… bravo!
I will leave you several links for you to mull over and links to other producers and commentators who are as equally appalled and dismayed as I am. Please sign every petition you find, I know that 38degrees are rather good at shouting up and please do consider Backlash UK and help donate where possible as this will be my line of defense in the UK if they wish to pursue me, although they can do it via Sarah’s company who will no doubt politely tell them to FUCK OFF!
What is banned? The Full list as described by Myles Jackman aka ObscenityLawyer
Oh, and as a protest, I am going to start writing in the style of American English, so to my North American readers, if I spell something “British” from now on and miss it, please do tell me and I will change the post accordingly.
- Your best bet is to check out Pandora’s in depth take on this HEREÂ & a concise post with all links HERE
(The 2nd url contains fantastic relevant posts I urge you to read and check up on which I won’t waste time with repeating here) - Check out Strand Media’s take on it HERE
- & there are various blog posts from around the world on it, here is one such example
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In other news, I will be starting to put together the first set of nominations ready for your votes, I hope this makes things a little more upbeat as reading Twitter and mails from my fellow Brits in our line of biz this past week has been rather depressing 🙁
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PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION TO REPEAL THE NEW PORN REGULATIONS
How much of this, I wonder, is due to the influence of the “Islamic” lobby in the UK? What are they going to try to ban next, beer? That will be their undoing!
John, I hope you don’t mind if I summarize (note the “z”!) my own position via your blog? Northern Spanking doesn’t have a similar platform where I can do so. I echo your sentiments absolutely and I too am thoroughly ashamed to be British. WE elected our Government and gave them the mandate to do this to us, or rather we didn’t! These “Regulations”, (they are not “Legislation” and so were never debated in our parliament by our elected representatives), come from ATVOD, an unelected Government quango. Using authority they misappropriated from EU legislation, they took it upon themselves widen the scope of their own authority massively, well beyond their European conterparts and thereby criminalize the livelihoods of the majority of UK-based BDSM/Fetish producers.
If we are driven out of business we become unemployed and have to find other ways to feed our families, the UK exchequer is deprived of our tax revenues and, you know what? EVERYTHING they say we cannot offer to the British public because its “harmful”, is freely available from non UK-based providers! How did they ever think this could work? Does anyone there understand the internet, or are they hoping it will just disappear as easily as they seem to think they can get rid of us?
Like you, John, I have completely relocated the business that operates Northern Spanking to the US. That’s domain name ownership, (I don’t actually own Northern Spanking any more), site hosting, billing, production and editorial control all now reside with a US citizen that is not me. I loved my business; I’ve been running it for nearly 15 years. Its still close to me of course but its not mine any more. And that makes a huge difference.
So, as far as Northern Spanking is concerned, for members and those considering joining, nothing whatsoever has changed, (including the awful ancient design – soon, Spring I think!). The preview arrangements are being re-jigged and should be up again, with new free ATVOD unfriendly content, in the next few days.
Having done what I can to protect myself, my remaining concern is for those decent, hard-working, imaginative, creative, talented and now downright scared people who cannot relocate to avoid this horror being inflicted upon them. They desperately need our help and support. If you love what they do, help them, please.
All readers of this forum will be consumers of or have an active interest in the availabilty of spanking/BDSM porn, porn that was legal to offer from the UK last week but isn’t now. As such, PLEASE, PLEASE can I ask you to sign this petition: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/72693. There are others too but this is the one that matters. With enough signatures, a parliamentary debate is mandatory. And, if you possibly can, make a donation, however small to Backlash-UK who fight for all our sexual freedoms on a voluntary basis and will be the lifeline for any of the remaining UK-based producers, in other words John’s and my friends of many years, if they should face the terrifying prospect of prosecution. The donation link is here: http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/
Thank You.
Paul, well put, far better than I could put it.
Well put. We must ALL fight this.
John politicians yuck they are a 2 faced lot ,Paul hello ,well im glad you bothcarry on elsewhere ,best from ,Tim.
It’s amazing in this day and age stuff like this still happens. Many respects to our spanking brethren over there in the UK. And thanks for sooooo much lovely stuff!