Yesterday saw the first nationwide ban on “three porn sites based in Cyprus” in Germany. While the names of the sites in question were not mentioned, the website Der Spiegel identified them as YouPorn, Pornhub and MyDirtyHobby.
As ErotisNews reported earlier about plans to block porn sites in Germany, there is a campaign in Germany to introduce age verification for people on all adult sites. The unwillingness of adult sites to cooperate with the introduction of proper age verification systems for German users was the reason why three porn sites were blocked yesterday.
An administrative court in Düsseldorf announced yesterday that it had rejected complaints by two unnamed party operators who claimed that Germany’s child protection laws did not apply to them because they were based in another European Union country.
As reported by the Associated Press, “the court said the decision taken by the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia state to ban the sites in Germany didn’t breach national, European or international law.”
The judges ruled that the German law applied because “children and young people are at risk of serious and grave danger from freely available pornographic internet sites.”
As part of their reasoning, the judges cited research showing that half of the minors surveyed had consumed pornography online, while only a quarter of parents used devices or software to block such content.
The ruling can be appealed, meanwhile, as Der Spiegel reports, “in order to avert the ban, the porn portals for German users would have to install one of the more than 80 youth protection systems approved in Germany. These essentially provide that a user has identified himself as of legal age with an identification document. It is also possible to identify yourself as of legal age via a corresponding account or a mobile phone contract if the age was recorded when the contract was signed.”
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