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Can anyone in the UK tell me what the law is with regards to ordering xxx videos from another country. I have had one confiscated by customs (straight sex...nothing illegal). I was under the impression that production was illegal but not distribution?

do a search using "customs". there's a ton of stuff on the forum already, about this topic.

Customs are supposed to have guidelines that match the 'new' R18 guidelines - see the post at for a run down of those.

I guess there's no guarantee customs would always get it right, though. Still, if you've had something confiscated that arguably lies within those guidelines then it may be worth querying their decision. On the other hand, they are not under any compunction to change their decision, even if it's clearly wrong under those terms, unless you take them to court - and to do that you may need to have a large legal fund.

The R18 guidelines themselves stem from police advice given to the bbfc about what it is and isn't generally possible to get convictions for under obscenity law, and are supposed to reflect our national "community standards" (as the yanks would say) regards obscenity. This is because the actual obscenity law at the bottom of it all has no precision, but uses vague terminology like "likely to corrupt or deprave" instead of defining clearly what is to be considered obscene. Because we live in an evolving society, this presents a moving target when you try and relate it to specific acts (and anyway, intangibles are bound to enter in in terms of the context, atmosphere, treatment, etc. of the depictions of those acts.)