Do you do anything that is now legal that was once illegal? Or anything that is illegal but was once legal? Or are you doing anything now that will soon be illegal?

Or, on a more mundane level, I used to drive around without a seatbelt sometimes. Wild.

As defined by the new Criminal Justice Bill(porn will be illegal if it shows)
An act which threatens or appears to threaten a person's life
An act which results in or appears to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals
An act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse
A person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal

smoking in a cafe while eating breakfast

The criminal justice bill is going to be a disaster - because "appears to threaten" is going to end up being entirely down to the opinions of the people on the jury. You could argue, for example, that a non-kinky porn photo that doesn't show STD protection could be life-threatening.

Furthermore, it only covers things that were made to be porn. So if, say, you're an artist, it's legal for you to make what appears to be a picture of someone being suffocated (for example) so long as it doesn't turn you on. If it turns you on - either by the thought of suffocating or being suffocated - then the same picture will be illegal.

(I use that as the example, because this law came about as a result of some suffocation-fetish sex which went wrong).

(said bill is going through its final Parliamentary reading as I write, I think)

wtf? "appears to threaten" is a disasterous legal standard, since it is vague to the point of being vaporous.

If it just said "threatens" instead, then in practise it would be interpreted as meaning "what ordinary reasonable people would find threatening", which is a perfectly reasonable judicial standard to apply.

What agenda is being served by fucking up the law to this degree?

Some of the government are didactic moralists; some are "all porn is evil to women!" feminist; and some just think that "being hard on all those dirty-mac-wearing internet pervs" will go down well with the electorate.

Which it will it appears from my completely unscientific research of co-workers who immediately thought I was defending rape when I suggested that this law might be crap.

I didn't notice this bit the first time through...

the government is tabling an amendment that would allow couples to keep pictures of themselves engaged in consensual acts - but not to distribute them.

What kind of crazyness is this?

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=4796

http://www.extremekidnapping.com/

Wow,it's a boom industry - here's another (I think).

http://www.semagoediv.com/main.php

My question with that amendment is: what happens when you split up? What happens if you ask a friend to work the camera - after all, it's pretty tricky to take photos of both of you. Are they not allowed to keep copies?

There was an opposition amendment to make the new law only allow to images whose creation and distribution is already covered by the Obscene Publications Act - in other words, "images which tend to deprave or corrupt", which is still very subjective - but it failed. The OPA is supposedly more in the spirit of the new law anyway, given that the reason for the new posession law is supposedly to stop people from being influenced to commit assault or murder because of viewing dirty porn; but it is very hard to get juries to convict under it.