Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620 - 624)

TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2006

BBFC

  Q620  Mr Evans: Have you found versions of films that you have banned being made available?

  Mr Cooke: Yes indeed, and every film regulator in the world has the same experience, but that is not a reason for giving up. I wonder if I could perhaps ask Peter to talk a bit about some of the discussions that we have been having with distributors and with others to indicate what some of the possibilities might be.

  Mr Johnson: I think it is worth saying just before that that since videos have been brought into the home, essentially children have been accessing age inappropriate material in a way that they did not before that but that did not make the Video Recordings Act irrelevant or pointless. Part of what we are saying is that it is not just about control. Classification is not just about controlling viewing; it is also about being of public value in itself. Parents especially but also other people find it useful to have a trusted guide to what they intend to view that they can use in order to control their children's viewing. It is not going to work without parents taking control of what their children access on-line, but if we have a system which people understand of material being tagged and classified, for instance using the BBFC's classification symbols, that can work with parental control systems so that parents can control their children's viewing with our help. What we have been talking to content providers and others about over the last few months (and talks are continuing) is about what service we can offer. For instance, a lot of the companies which have started to offer downloads have started appending our classification symbols to them because they recognise that that is a useful piece of information for the public. What we want to do and what we are talking to the industry about is formalising that so that, for instance, when a work is classified for DVD release we would also give it a download certificate which would carry with it the right to use our symbols and our consumer advice but also an obligation to tag it so it could be read by parental control systems with information that tells them what the classification means, and links into our website as such. We are finding a positive response from the industry about that because they recognise, faced with the jungle of the internet which offers everything, there is a value in offering to their customers a guidance which they understand. Especially with film content the guidance they understand is the guidance of the BBFC classification and consumer advice that they see every time they go to a cinema and every time they rent a DVD. We are also talking about, as David mentioned, offering some sort of franchise model to the more dynamic websites where you do not have a fixed offering but where things are much more dynamic, which could be done at one removed, perhaps using our guidance and our training and our supervision but not actually involving pre-publication oversight.

  Q621  Mr Sanders: In your evidence you made the point that unregulated new media does not yet overwhelm the regulated sphere and you said "it is still some way off". Firstly, how long is that period of it being some way off, and even if it is some way off it still means there is an enormous amount of unregulated content out there that is not being looked at and regulated?

  Mr Cooke: There is but it is not causing a flight from our classification system at the moment because the download services which are being launched just at the moment are starting small and the DVD market up until recently has still been very healthy. It is showing one or two signs of saturation at the moment and things could move quite quickly, but it is very difficult to predict. All sorts of industry analysts are trying to make predictions at the moment and it could take five or 10 years or it could start to move very quickly, but our worry I think is that there could be a bit of a knock-on effect once we start to see a substantial movement of what would have been material released on DVD for sale or rental. Once that starts to go the download route exclusively, rather than in parallel with two offerings, then you could see a flight from the DVD market and the effects could start to happen quite quickly. I do not know if there is anything you want to add to that.

  Mr Johnson: I think it is very difficult to predict how quickly it will happen. The Film Council suggested people are making up their business models as they go at the moment. Certainly the offerings that are going to be made are going to be quite experimental. The industry will see how the public wants to consume this and what business models they want to follow, and will follow that. As I think was suggested earlier as well, there is still an appetite for the finished, packaged thing. People like to own "the thing" and not just a computer file and our research has suggested that, certainly going forward to 2010, there is not likely to be a significant decline in the number of DVD titles released in the UK. Predicting beyond 2010 is probably a bit of a mug's game when the industry has not really decided how it is going to do this itself yet.

  Q622  Mr Sanders: When uncensored material is available, does that influence how you censor material that is submitted to you?

  Mr Cooke: No, it does not at all. It is, as we have said, marginal at the moment and our approach has always been that we should apply our guidelines to the material which is submitted to us in accordance with the public's wishes.

  Q623  Mr Sanders: But are the public's wishes not being determined by the numbers that perhaps are accessing uncensored material elsewhere? In other words, if there is obviously an increasing demand (technologically driven admittedly but there is a demand) does not that then influence how you play a role as the censor to submitted material?

  Mr Cooke: I do not believe it does because certainly when we most recently redid the public consultation, which was 2004-05, we found that all of the typical concerns around areas like violence, drugs, depiction of sexual activity, and so on, were replicated in much the same way from the kind of concerns that the public had expressed four or five years before. Okay, there are small variations at the margins. You get things like people may be slightly less worried about particular techniques in relation to drugs because there is a lot of drugs education going on and there is a lot of knowledge, so in that area the concern shifted a bit more towards glamorisation of drugs, but there was no evidence at all from the big consultation that the fact that at the margins some of this material is available on the internet meant that the public did not think we should still have a proper classification system for films and DVDs and video games.

  Q624  Mr Sanders: To turn it around the other way, is it possible that the way you regulate material influences what is not submitted to you and appears in new media?

  Mr Cooke: It is difficult to know. We do know that our classifications and our consumer advice do influence self-regulation in areas that are not covered by the Video Recordings Act. We see, for instance, lots of attempts to copy our consumer advice in a way which we do not think is always very good. I do not think we have any evidence that we are causing a problem in the other direction because at the moment the material that we see on film and DVD and games is still coming in in large numbers. Pete, is there anything you want to add to that?

  Mr Johnson: That is very true. The mainstream market in particular, where we have already seen a flight away from DVD to the online market, has been in the world of pornography, where the mainstream market in the UK is particularly constrained by the specific controls on how that can be accessed, because people have to visit a licensed sex shop and the material cannot be sold by mail order. That has had an effect of driving some producers to do their business online exclusively because they can access their customers more easily, but that is a very specific effect of a specific aspect of the Video Recordings Act. We still have submitted to us very large numbers of R18 material, even though we cut 23% of it for being violent, abusive or obscene. That still comes in to us and, if there is a mainstream market for hard core pornography, that still comes to BBFC for classification. That has not been driven out by the ease with which it can be delivered by other means.

  Chairman: I am sorry we do not have more time, but thank you very much.






 
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