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Chad, you are right of course, but it's a special situation as soon as porno becomes involved. I really value your contribution and help and of course I can't enter a legal discussion with you since I'm just less than an amateur when it comes to law. However, I try to keep myself informed about the law situation to be safe.
A lot of information I have about the legal situation over here comes from a German adult webmaster board where Mr. Koetz is very active himself. There are lengthy discussions about all legal aspects of the adult business and a wealth of useful information and links about the local situation.
The real problem is the distribution through Internet, though. If you own or run a website with explicit material (considered as porn), you would have to take any measures that the website either would be completely blocked for access from Germany (and it would involve proxies) for people under the age of eighteen or you would have to implement those nifty little government approved AVS systems. The latter of course would require face-to-face identification before granting access to your visitors, because that's the only measure that will be accepted by German laws. How you manage face-to-face is entirely up to you.
The second point is the law that holds you responsible for your actions even if they would be perfectly legal in a foreign country. This particular law is mainly aimed at sex tourists and afaik it is based on a EU directive and is also implemented into the laws of other (if not all) EU countries.
For example, the age of consent between an adult and a minor in Germany is 16. In other countries (even in Europe) it's 15 or even 14. So if a German gets involved into a consenting act with a person of 15, as it would be perfectly legal in some neighboring countries, whilst both stay in this particular country, the German person would still break the German law. And since the law doesn't explicitly say that it is limited to sexual contacts, I'm afraid it could be used for internet activity involving porn as well.
It might not be a realistic scenario that someone goes after you, but you never know and of course one should accept and respect the laws even if you don't like them. Of course I can be wrong, but I just want to stress the possible traps Simon could run into. It's always better to be safe than sorry.
Every now and then adult webmasters, as it happens very often on the above mentioned German board, come to a forum like this to receive any form of confirmation that possible illegal actions are legal if you try to work around the laws. But luckily for those who ask, they almost never get to hear what they obviously want to hear.
It's always the best way to seek legal advice from a lawyer if in doubt. "I've read on some webmaster board that it's pretty okay" probably doesn't stand very well in court.
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attis, you are starting to sound like a lawyer. :smoke:
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Dittos, Dittos, Dittos on all that Patti said above (aka Basschick).
Good luck with your search and my one peice of advice, do not pick your hosting based upon price and choose that actually supports the adult industry, in the long run you will be far better off that the few Euro's that you might save in the short term. $0.02
