Do I need a license for porn in the UK?

As far back as 2016, the UK government has been talking about a porn licence. What’s the truth behind the news?

You may not have seen the stories about the porn licence in the UK, few people have. It does have the chance to restrict access to pornography, and whilst the idea behind the proposal seems sound, it falls short in execution.

The conversation about the UK porn licence has been back in the news in May 2021, so we’re going to get you bang up to date on everything that you need to know. We’re going to look at:

• The premise behind the porn licence concept
• What a porn licence would look like
• The chances of a porn licence coming into effect in the UK

Keeping you in the loop in the skin industry.

Why does the UK government want to introduce a porn licence?

In 2016 the idea of completing age verification checks on people accessing porn in the UK was mooted, and then enshrined into law in the Digital Economy Act in April 2017.

The idea was simple enough – the government in the UK wants to stop anyone under the age of 18 from accessing porn. A noble cause that we here an SinParty and we’re sure most people would agree with.

It’s a challenge that no one has been able to yet solve, and the British government struggled for two and a half long years and couldn’t make it work.

What is a UK porn licence?

Because the idea never quite made it into reality, no one really knows how the system was going to work.

It was weeks out from being introduced and still there was nothing solid about how a porn licence, or age verification as it was officially called, was going to work.

The Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) decided to farm out the responsibility of setting up the scheme to verify the age of every Brit accessing porn to the British Board of Film Classification. Somewhat ironically, it was originally a body to protect freedom of the media in the UK.

The plan looked something like this:

• Companies would verify the age of person through the use of a credit card, the person submitting an ID online, or by them going into a shop and asking for a porn licence
• The age verification companies would issue a token, pass, or other type of asset that would be their online ticket to porn, or porn licence
• When they went on a porn site, they’d have to enter a code or password to prove they’d done the process

Problems include having every single porn site ever on the internet onboard with adding this age verification check. You’d also need every porn site to accept every age verification.

What sites would have to have age verification checks?

In the law as it was in 2017, social media was excluded from having to perform these checks.

We all know how there’s absolutely no porn or adult content on any social media whatsoever. Looking at you, Twitter, Reddit, Twitch…

Any site that was less than one-third porn wouldn’t have to complete the checks. If the site wasn’t marketed as a porn site, they wouldn’t need to check your porn licence.

They found a way to not make you need an Instagram licence, but it kinda defeated the object. It’s much easier to stumble across porn on social media by accident than it is on the general internet.

Do I need a porn licence in the UK?

Thankfully, the DCMS dropped the whole crock back in October 2019. It would have been the first governmental check on age to access porn anywhere in the world.

By stopping the plan, they also made sure that your privacy was protected. Imagine the database of the porn licence companies getting hacked. Do you want your mum knowing you’re not pure and innocent and you have a cheeky wank to big-boobed MILFs?

As it stands in May 2021, you don’t need a porn licence or to prove your age to any government-appointed body to watch porn online.

Will there be a porn licence in the future?

Recently, there has been a new discussion about a law called the Online Safety Bill.

This law under discussion in the British parliament doesn’t include anything about a porn licence, and this makes us very happy.

That’s not the end of it, because the minister in charge of it has said he’s not completely against adding it into the law.

The proposed law as it stands focuses on preventing children accessing porn by accident. It does acknowledge that it happens usually through social media. Restrictions could be put in place on sites that have user-generated content, including photo and video sharing, and live streaming.

SinParty would fall under this remit, and we’d be happy to comply with any law that comes our way.

Will porn licences be effective?

The way we’d expect the porn licence to work is through checking the location of your IP address. This is super easy for a website to do, but not so difficult for people to get around.

There’s only so much a website can do to figure out your location. If a tool like a VPN is used, it can be nearly impossible to tell where porn is being accessed from. Just as the folks in countries where porn is illegal like Indonesia or Saudi Arabia.

What is a UK porn licence?

There is currently no such thing as the UK porn licence, although there a law that will allow for it. The government couldn’t organise a gang bang in a brothel and the who plan was dropped in 2019.

Watch this space, because the idea hasn’t completely gone away. Have you got the balls to raise your concerns with your local MP? Give it a go and let us know what response you get.