Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 611 - 619)

TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2006

BBFC

  Q611  Chairman: Can I welcome David Cooke, the Director, and Peter Johnson, the Head of Policy, from the British Board of Film Classification. Good morning. In your evidence you have identified a number of ways in which loopholes in the existing laws are being exploited but obviously the pace of change is very fast and we are hearing about different ways of distribution. Do you actually think that we are going to need to go back and look at the whole way in which we regulate content to take account of these changes or are you still concerned that we should address these existing loopholes?

  Mr Cooke: We think that most of the existing loopholes are pretty marginal. In a way they are things that are enabled by the internet and things that film classifiers all around the world are probably facing. They certainly do not seem to have had a damaging effect on the DVD market in recent years, which has been booming. Our fundamental concern is about what might happen in the future, starting right now when things could be very different and we would face not so much a loophole but possibly a bypassing of the Video Recordings Act in quite a major way. Let me just try and explain this. Last year 17,000 titles were classified by the BBFC and 13,000 of those were DVDs, so that is very much the bulk of our business at the moment. In principle, all of those titles could at some point in the future migrate to distribution by download rather than in physical format. Lawyers disagree about what precisely the impact of the Video Recordings Act is in that situation, but I think that the general view is that the Video Recordings Act probably would not bite. That has not been tested in the courts yet. That could produce a situation in which our current, we believe, quite well respected and trusted system of age ratings and consumer advice would cease to apply and we know from our workload at the moment that there would be some very abusive material included in that content, and we have given some examples of some of that in our evidence. Self-regulation would obviously apply in that context but the question is really do we believe that that would be adequate or would we be in the kind of situation that we faced in the early 1980s with the concerns on video nasties. We think that there are probably two broad approaches to tackling this problem. We are certainly not pitching to trespass on anybody else's patch or to rub up against other regulators and we are certainly not pitching to try and regulate all downloads, which will constitute a huge and variegated mass of material, but we do think it would be possible to look quite carefully to seek to identify that part of the download market which would be very similar to DVD retail and DVD rental and to seek to bring that within the Video Recordings Act. That would be one approach. We can well see that that would be controversial and would be against the tenor of some of the other discussions you have had in the Committee. Another approach which could be considered, either in conjunction or separately, would be to look at what kind of co-regulatory offerings were possible in this new environment. We believe that our expertise and the trust which BBFC ratings and consumer advice have and the high recognition factor that our ratings have, are the kinds of things that would enable us to play a part.

  Q612  Alan Keen: There is obviously going to be some need for self-regulation. What connections and discussions are you having with other people that you cannot really control yourselves?

  Mr Cooke: We talk a lot and have very close links with the self-regulatory organisations at the moment. We were talking earlier this week to ATVOD, who bring together a number of the current and future video on demand offerers, and we have also talked a lot to Icstis who operate in the area of mobile phone content. We talk a lot, too, to broadcasters such as Sky, the BBC and Channel 4, and we also, as you know, cover the top and difficult end of the video games market. We have very close links with PEGI, which is the pan-European games system. We have had exchange visits with these organisations. In some cases we have provided training sessions for them because we have particular areas of expertise like child protection or dealing with pornography where they have been very interested to pick up on it. There is a worry for us though to what extent are we diluting our brand and passing on our expertise in a form that will not get operated in quite the way that we would like to operate it.

  Q613  Alan Keen: What about websites which are almost uncontrollable? What is being done and what more can be done towards that and should you be involved?

  Mr Cooke: Are you thinking of things like user-generated content and so on?

  Q614  Alan Keen: Yes.

  Mr Cooke: We cannot honestly claim that what we regulate at the moment—films, DVDs, video games—involves very much user-generated content, so in a sense we cannot come along and say we are the experts because this is part of our current practice. What we do know, though, is some of the worrying material, some of the abusive material, whether it is generated by users or others, is the kind of area where we do have particular expertise. We spend quite a lot of our time looking, for instance, at sex works and trying to spot what is abusive in sex works because sometimes it seems to us that no human intelligence has been applied at all to what is being submitted to us, and we really need sometimes to make very detailed cuts to that kind of material. We have developed quite an expertise in the area of indecent images of children, which again is a very important element of our general aim of protecting children through the classification system. We have developed expertise in the area of animal cruelty. We have developed a lot of expertise in areas like what kind of techniques might children imitate and which are the ages to be particularly worried about issues like self harm or the portrayal of drugs and so on. So we believe that we do provide a pool and a source of expertise that we would be very happy to make available in dealing with material on websites. Peter, is there anything you want to add to that?

  Mr Johnson: With websites everyone has to recognise, and certainly we recognise that the days in which you could control everything that people could access are gone, unless you want to impose some sort of Chinese solution, which I do not think anyone is in favour of. I think what can be done and what the BBFC can offer is a way to enable content providers and those who are seeking content to access that content in a safe area and enable content providers to make their material clearly labelled in a way that the British public understand so that members of the British public who are seeking content for themselves or children in their care will know that that content will meet certain standards. I think with the standards that we have established on film for over 90 years and on video for over 20 years, which are widely recognised and trusted in the UK, it seems sensible that websites make use of those in order to label their content in a way that the public can understand.

  Q615  Alan Keen: Do you feel that government and Ofcom take advantage of your expertise enough? Are you surprised sometimes that you do not get more requests?

  Mr Cooke: We have very good working relationships both with government and with Ofcom. For instance, we have been talking a lot to Ofcom recently about labelling and also about media education, because that is another strand of our activity. We do quite a lot of work with schools and colleges. I think everybody is wrestling—and I am sure lots of other people have said this to the Committee as well—with what the implications of the new world are going to be and which are going to be the kind of approaches which might be most fruitful. We would be quite happy to consider alternative offerings to our current system of regulation, which essentially involves seeing everything all through in advance, and it is a very thorough and careful system of regulation, but one that you could not describe as light touch. It is one that has been used for films for a long time, but we would be very happy to look at whether there were other kinds of regulatory offerings that we might provide in this new world. For instance, we classify films and DVDs on the basis of guidelines which we update every three or four years to make sure that they are in line with public opinion and the issues that the public thinks are important. The last time we did that it involved consulting 11,000 people so it was a very major exercise, one of the biggest consultation exercises that a regulator has done in this country. It may well be that individual players in the new markets might not want to undertake anything like that but might see some attraction in trying to derive some rules of practice from the guidelines which have served us well in the area of film and DVD.

  Q616  Alan Keen: Finally can I say that in an uneducated past, like many people, I thought you must have an interesting job but having read your submission this morning I think it is one of the last jobs in the world that I would like to do. I would like to thank you for what you do.

  Mr Cooke: It has its compensations but it has its less pleasant side as well.

  Q617  Mr Evans: 20 years ago you were all powerful; now you have not got a leg to stand on really with the new media. You say that you have got all this expertise but, quite frankly, when you are looking at the internet broadcast stuff that people can receive as good a quality as if it was on the telly, and you say you have got a role there, are people not in reality bypassing you?

  Mr Cooke: It is obviously a danger and that is why we are bringing these issues about the scope of the legislation to you. We think that it is worth looking at whether the Video Recordings Act, which is obviously 20-odd years old now, is able to cope with the kind of situation we are in, but I do not think it follows that there is nothing you can do, and countries obviously all around the world are looking at this and different approaches are being brought forward. One piece of work which I am involved in in a personal capacity is that I am a member of the PEGI advisory board. This is the pan-European games system and it is doing work on whether it is possible to provide any kind of regulatory service in the on-line area. That runs right up against the difficulties that you have just mentioned of how on earth do you regulate on-line games. PEGI is doing some work to see whether it is possible to provide a kite-marking service for portals that distribute on-line games allied to a modified version of its questionnaire which is a self-regulatory questionnaire for classifying games. Nobody pretends it is straightforward, and I think the jury is still out on whether this is going to fly or not. That is a very real example of an attempt to try and provide an offering for parents and the public in this very new and difficult area.

  Q618  Mr Evans: Peter mentioned there is the Chinese route but nobody wants to go down that. So then you are left with the reality of the situation which is that you exist and you can provide a safe haven for people who want to use the internet so that the youngsters and the kids and those who do not want to see video nasties and various other things can feel safe in the knowledge that they are not going to be harmed in that way, or their kids will not be harmed in that way, and then there is the other side of it which is the free-for-all where everything is available to everybody. In the past, you were able to control all of that with film classification and the classifications that you gave for games, but the reality is that basically 12-year-olds can see things now on the internet that before you at least guarded them against. Do you accept that that is roughly where you stand now?

  Mr Cooke: There is a difference. It is possible now but not in a way that fundamentally affects the regulatory protection that we provide. Yes, you can find things on the internet, for example you can probably find uncut versions of films that we have cut and you can probably find versions of films that we have banned as well.

  Q619  Mr Evans: Do you look on the net to see if that is so?

  Mr Cooke: Yes, we do.


 
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