egafd.com

I dip into this forum on the odd occasion & find the info interesting & informative but the thing that puzzles me is this. Whichever way you look at it Your Choice and all the other mail order firms are breaking the law by selling unlicensed vids & sending them from within the UK. Ben Dover actually recommends/promotes/endorses his stuff that Your Choice sells. For this he must receive money & if anyone says any different then they are mistaken. He, surely, is guilty of conspiracy which is a punishable offence. He's commiting a crime & telling everyone about it. Have I got something wrong here? Am I missing something? Has the law changed or what?

You are not missing anything....I am puzzled by what you are asking....Do you want a signed statement by some of these people....
So long as I get my videos I dont care where they are posted....We have been here and done this before....
Have you got a moral problem about what goes on?

As far as I understand it, Your Choice have purchased the rights from Ben Dover to sell his stuff. Which means that in actual fact, they are licensed to sell it. Your Choice doesn't sell originals and doesn't provide box covers, but that is a seperate issue from licensing.

The only crime that is being commited is by companies who are copying and selling stuff without permission from the orignating studio or pornographer.

Mr Dover is commiting no crime by producing stuff then allowing distributors to sell them for a fee payable to himself.

I'm sure you know all this already, so I don't really get what your problem is. Could you explain a bit further?

Selling unrated videos and DVDs in the U.K., via mail order is against the law. Your Choice, and for that matter all the other distributors based outside the U.K. are not bound by the laws of this country. Thus, sending money to Holland, or the U.S.A. or to Timbuktoo, for the purchase of unrated videos etc., is not illegal. The distributors point of despatch is their business, and if they should instruct a local warehouse to send videos to U.K. addresses, the local warehouse is not doing mail order business - it is simply delivering goods on instruction form the principal in another country.
Look at it from the point of transport costs - sneding one master tape to the U.K. is a good deal cheaper than sending a truckload of boxed videos for delivery.
Sadly, once again, it seems that we have someone showing an unhealthy interest in the workings of an industry - could this be another of those "lurkers" attemptiong, in a roundabout way, to gather sufficient imformation to allow them to attempt to impose their unhealthy, repressed views on the rest of us?
I can't help thinking that IV and Gradgrind are alive and well, and sneaking around the web sites.

Come the glorious revolution, the oppressors will be sorry!

The Porno Avenger

Thanks for the info. I definitely have no problems with what goes on in the industry, quite the reverse in fact & there seems to be a fair ignorance of the law. The point I was trying to make is that if a film does not have a BBFC certificate then it is against the law to offer them for sale & this is what the police use to get convictions these days. They gave up trying the obscenity route a few years ago. Even if an R18 video is sold anywhere else other than a licenced shop then that is illegal. It is also illegal to send R18's thro' the mail from a UK address (but not from outside). It is totally irrelevant whether or not Ben Dover has given his permission & if any of Your Choice agents in this country were tracked down they would be prosecuted(as they were in the early 90's & why they now have several agents, rather than just one, dispersed over the country) & treated the same as the Soho shops, which are regularly raided.
We still live in a very repressive 'you can't do this' society which treats its citizens like children & allows it's vindictive police force free reign to do anything & they are simply not to be trusted & one should never let one's guard down which I think is what Ben has done.
Again, I don't think I'm wrong

Ben has done nothing wrong. He has licensed his films to a firm based in the Netherlands. How they distribute them is their look-out. The risk, as you rightly say, is mainly with the Your Choice agents.

If Soho shops, and I presume you mean the unlicensed ones, are raided, they just restock and go on. Hazard of business. There are many more legit shops now, anyway.

I am sorry you are still sticking to the conspiracy theories. No doubt there is a way to go on liberalising this country, but it beggars belief in the way people do not appreciate the drastic sea change that has happened in the last year or two. LEGAL hardcore videos. HARDCORE porn in newsagents. Right-wing Tories lining up with Socialists to demand decriminalisation of cannabis. So it reeks of cynical opportunism, but so what. Yeah, too many aspects of political life are still rooted in the old paternalistic ways but shit, things are changing for the better.

You don't think you are wrong? I know you are wrong.

it's curious how it's almost a matter of religious belief for some that things can never get better. if things never get better, what's the point in trying to do anything?

the state IS ever more tentacular in its efforts to surveille our private lives but the individual is also empowered by changes in society, over which politicians can only play catch up - peter lilley for cryin' out loud!?!

h/c is here; equal age of consent is here; the death of deference is here. it's up to us to maintain the momentum and it's easier to do in a positive frame of mind, surely!

I've just stumbled across this & I found the amount of ignorance out there a bit depressing. Basically Mr puzzled is spot on & most of the rest of the comments are so far off the wall they should be on another forum.
Your personal assumptions are not facts. I work in a solicitor's office & we have a case at the moment of a guy who basically was just dealing amongst friends. He has been hit with a wrecking ball.
Computer confiscated, bank & building society accounts frozen & house deeds frozen. They left him his furniture & a couple of doors not smashed in. They're trying to take practically everything that he owns. All his videos were straightforward but had no BBFC licence & that is what he's being charged with. Anybody associated with or helping him is also having problems -that is the conspiracy law. If Ben has any cheques going through his bank accounts from Your Choice he'd better watch out. That is the law, believe me.
In the 80's a law came in (mainly for use against Drug pushers) which allowed the state to confiscate any assetts which they think came from illegal means & it's a lot worse than you think. The onus is on the accused to prove where all his money came from otherwise he loses it. If, for instance, a person turns over 50,000 but makes 20,000 he still has to pay 50,000. Another case we have is a guy who has a drug habit which costs him about 30 pounds a day which he got by dealing. The police asked him how long he'd been an addict - he said 8 years. The confiscation order on him is 8*365*30 which comes to about 88,000 pounds. Crazy & totally Bonkers but this is the law & you think that this country is getting more liberal. You want to work at the sharp end mate because some of the legistation coming in is frightening!!

Angus, the very fact that you deal with the 'sharp end' is evidence enough that you are letting the one or two extremities you are unfortunate enough to involve yourself with effect your perception of everything.

I don't believe for a second some of the more far-reaching aspects of what you have just said - it smacks of someone who is exagerrating things to try and enforce what is a weak point.

As a country, we are becoming more liberal. I have dealt with un-categorised videos (outside of the BBFC) for years and years. People who have been in positions to do stuff about it have known about it, and have done nothing.

Instead of barging your way onto the forum on your little soapbox spouting what you think you know at us, why not ask some questions first so you can be more informed? There are some on this forum who are very very up to speed on the way things work - I'd suspect far more so then you as we all know that the law is playing catch up constantly.

This isn't meant to be a personal attack, just I get frustrated at the people who seem to enjoy informing the rest of us how bad things are when they are balatantly not.


Matt.
mattparker.co.uk