The prosecution was widely condemned by the liberati of Twitter, and the acquittal therefore welcomed as an important victory against state censorship on a moral level.
But if you sympathise with Peacock, it's worth sparing a though for Darryn Walker and what is probably one of the most important failed UK prosecutions in the history of the internet.
In 2007 Mr Walker published a fantasy/horror story about the torture, mutilation and rape of members of pop group Girls Aloud on a Usenet Newsgroup. (The story remained for at least a year under the alt.sex.stories hierarchy but has, from a precursory check today, since disappeared.)
Shocking and disturbing, sure - but should such fiction be illegal? And when it's hidden in some internet backwater where's the harm?
And, since the story involved selling body parts of the dismembered songstresses on eBay one can only assume the work contained a level of comedy and/or satire.
And, since the story involved selling body parts of the dismembered songstresses on eBay one can only assume the work contained a level of comedy and/or satire.
Soon after publication, an 18-month legal ordeal which saw Darryn lose his civil service job was started by the most unlikely moral guardians of The Daily Star:
"We can reveal that Interpol has been notified to help track down the man behind the bizarre work"The Daily Star claimed Girls Aloud members were being "stalked by a vile internet psycho". Sensationalised in the mainstream gutter press brought the story to a whole new audience.
Daily Star, 26th July 2007
Is it legal to read the "Girls (Scream) Aloud" story online? Asked one Yahoo user in 2008 after the story retained infamy as the prosecution crawled forward.
What the Daily Star did in 2007 is report the work of fiction to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an unofficial voluntary UK body set up to tackle online images of child abuse.
A little-known enclave of the IWF's remit is to "police" UK publications and their conformance to UK laws like the Obscene Publications Act, as well as tackle child abuse worldwide via a mixture of methods including web filtering by all the UK's major ISPs.
Incidentally, today's acquittal of Michael Peacock for the sale of obscene DVDs should all but end the IWF's interference with "obscene" online publications in the UK, but there's still Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 banning images of "extreme" pornography. Anyway, I digress.
The snag? The story was published on US-based Newsnet servers, but that didn't stop the IWF, who ascertained the same site hosted fantasy child abuse stories; so, according to the Daily Start at least, alerted "Interpol". Note here that written works fall outside the IWF's remit so its actions here are questionable.
The story was traced to Darryn Walker and he was arrested in February 2008. Despite being from South Shields, Tyneside, the Met Police's Obscene Publications Unit ran the prosecution.
This itself is significant because the Met Police's Clubs and Vice Unit, which encompassed the Obscene Publications Unit, ran a charge in 1996 to force ISPs to censor numerous online newsgroups to block not only images of child abuse but also cheerleaders and centrefolds, according to Julian Petley's 2009 reference Web Control.
Imagine running the risk of being arrested, losing your job and fighting an 18-month legal battle to clear your name all because of a fantasy story published online? Well this happened here in the UK just under 4 years ago.
Mr Walker didn't even get the satisfaction of being cleared by a jury. Instead, the trial collapsed on its opening day (29th June 2009 at Newcastle Crown Court) when the prosecution offered no evidence.
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