Yesterday, Metropolitan police arrested eight people on charges of illegally distributing pornographic material.
The Met have yet to reveal exactly what the pornographic material was, but I bet it was disgusting. Truly awful. Can you imagine what it might have been? I bet it probably had people in it … doing … things. Terrible things.
What do you reckon it was?
In our dedicated efforts to learn what kind of wretched, filthy, disgusting material instigated the arrests, we used the Internet, this bastion of knowledge and purity, to look up the government's definition of obscenity.
According to Section 12 of the Code for Crown Prosecutors:
"an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect or (where the article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it."
…which covers a lot of ground.
The law can be used to prosecute those guilty of 'Extreme & Dangerous Creepiness' (a term we have just now invented) - child pornography and the like. Or it can be used to ban Hubert Selby's 'Last Exit To Brooklyn'. So we as a society should take care that we are not, out of mere reactionary fear, squelching another great work of literary genius. Or in the case of the 4000 videotapes and DVD's seized, cinematic genius.
Three more men were arrested on suspicions of money laundering. But, to be fair, it is very difficult to get indy film projects funded these days.
