We investigate: pornography, home PCs and the law

Many people find adult material distasteful and even offensive, but it is a booming industry. But what’s the legal status of pornographic websites?

Could home PC users find themselves in hot water if images in spam emails, records of web searches or even nude holiday snaps are found on their PC when taken in for repair? These are the questions that we will answer as Computeractive investigates liability for pornography on home PCs.

What is illegal?
The law on pornographic material has changed in the years since Computeractive last wrote about it back in 2003. Back then, only images that depicted scenes of child abuse were illegal to store on a hard disk ­ and they still are. Anything else, no matter how tasteless, was legitimate to own. Now the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 has introduced a new offence: possession of extreme pornographic images.

To qualify as illegal under the new legislation, material ­ whether it’s an image or a video ­ must meet two criteria: it must be produced solely for the purpose of sexual arousal and be what the Act calls ‘grossly disgusting’. This means any material that provides a realistic depiction of any of four acts.

These are not subjects we usually discuss in Computeractive, but we think it is important to be as clear on these points as decency will allow: acts that could endanger a person’s life, result in serious injury ­ particularly to the private parts, ­ depict interference with a corpse, or sexual acts with an animal.

All other kinds of hardcore pornography between consenting adults is legal to
own. However, sending such images via email or by distributing web links will leave you open to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act, while sending any kind of erotic or pornographic image from a work computer is unlikely to impress your employer, who would be legally liable.

What have I downloaded?
It’s important to be clear about what ownership means in the context of online images. Whenever you view an image or video via a web page or email attachment, you have in fact downloaded a copy of it. The files that make up web pages, for example, are stored on a part of your computer called the cache ­ when you type in a web address or click a link, the computer that stores the page or image sends a copy of the data to your cache so it can be displayed on your screen.