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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