Adultshop.com’s  federal court case last week has already had one positive outcome even though it is only one day old and set to resume in a few weeks time. The Classification Review Board who were the nominated defendents have now been replaced by the Commonwealth and the Australian Family Association who have been determined to be ‘friends of the court’ and therefore allowed to claim that they will be aggrieved in some way if Adultshop.com wins the case. It is also conceivable now that the state attorney’s general could also get involved as a win by Adultshop.com would certainly affect their legislation…hopefully it would shred it!

The case has already highlighted the fact that the OFLC have done no community opinion or awareness work on the X classification and now they have been forced to accept that they will start doing this.

Adultshop.com’s legal team are very happy with the way the case is going and if the bookies were offering real odds on the outcome after one day’s hearings, I’d put our Eros member at 6/4 on and John Howard at 5/4 against. Odds that are probably slightly better than you can get on him winning the election at the moment!

The federal government’s Online Content legislation is still receiving attention in the media and Fiona and I met with the Minister’s senior IT advisor in Sydney last week. We may be about to see a breakthrough on the way in which publications are judged and a few other items.

The stories below on erotic fiction are very timely in this case but we’ve also run them because we don’t think adult retailers and wholesalers are aware of the extremely lucrative market in erotic fiction these days. Most of the books that the stories below refer to are ‘submittable publications’ under the Classification Act but none of the publishers or distributors obey the law and send them in to the OFLC. Under the new legislation we are dealing with on behalf of our members, most of these books would (or should) get an MA15+ or R18+ rating as they depict or describe ‘high level sex scenes’ which is what R18+ films do. Its just that books work in the theatre of the mind.

We reckon adult shops should be stocking a lot more of these novels in the way that they used to stock those tawdry novels written by male copywriters in the 70s and 80s. There is still a very good market for this material and many of the people who by vibrators and lingerie in an adult shop would probably prefer a good ‘bodice-ripper’ to a DVD. Food for thought…