Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
The judge too was unimpressed. Ordering the man to complete 200 hours of unpaid work, District Judge Roger Eley said: "There is no doubt that this was a revolting and perverted piece of video and there is no reasonable explanation for this being on your mobile for the time it was.
"If you had any previous convictions or you had distributed this piece of video, you would be going to prison."
So what is going on? One possibility is that these are different clips and the two successful prosecutions were indeed in respect of extreme porn. An alternative is a simple cultural mismatch.
One individual who knows this material well suggests that in fact the video is actually a viral clip called "BME Pain Olympics: Final Round". This event is one of the events that occasionally occurs at BME BBQs – events staged by Body Mod Ezine, put on to see who has the highest pain tolerance and stamina, though it is not clear whether the video is "authentic" or not.
Revolting? Probably. Pornographic? Probably not. However, the message coming through loud and clear from the UK legal system seems to be that such activity is well beyond the ken of most of the legal establishment – and if it involves genitals, it must be sexual.
Meanwhile, another possibly worrying case hits the headlines today of a Dorset dentist - David Hill from Pennington Close, West Moors - convicted on the sole charge of possessing extreme pornography depicting pain being inflicted.
Prosecutor Desmond Duffy told Bournemouth Crown Court: "He [Mr Hill] accepted that what he had downloaded was extreme in nature, acknowledging participants were likely to be experiencing severe pain and risking injury as a result."
Without sight of the material seized it is impossible to comment further. However, afficionadoes of this law will be aware that neither experiencing severe pain nor the risk of injury are specifically outlawed within the law. ®
COMMENTS
All The Madmen
How did we get here, folks? What perverse, twisted process of 'law', has led us down this particularly dark and wretched road? How on earth is this idiocy being allowed to happen in British courts? Why are judges even entertaining this outrage to common sense?
It really is incredible. What sinister forces must be at work in police and government to cook up such a hateful legislation? Truly, this is Orwellian. How do we codify this? 'Wrongthought'? Perhaps we need to ask the Ministry of Love for some clarification.
The ONLY silver lining is that the more the useless, idiot police go about arresting and criminalizing consenting adults for consensual adult sexual activity the closer comes the day of reckoning. You can push your luck with the proles only so far.
I sincerely hope these clowns get called to account for their blatant - and dangerous - stupidity sooner rather than later. How far down this awful road must we travel before it gets too late to turn back..? Keep calling these fools out, El Reg, please...
Kafkaesque
So what about beheading, hanging and other execution videos which are obviously violent, offensive and there's often no doubt about authenticity or harm ?
Some of these have previously been carried on mainstream TV channels in the UK. I'm sure someone somewhere will get a perverted kick out of such things. I know there are also things I would call unacceptable, and I also believe there should be criminal offences for some cases.
However; it seems that this law (typical of New Labour heritage) is wide-sweeping, poorly defined, has lack of clarity and is open to interpretation by prosecution, judge and jury (and probably deliberately so). The same can be seen in anti-terrorism legislation where "items useful to terrorits" can include the humble A-to-Z and even cruet sets (if thrown hard enough at an MP with intent to influence government policies).
A state-sponsored execution is obviously different to a 'snuff movie' crime but it appears that the law is not interested in such technicalities, intent nor intent of ownership.
We need to shake off this 'Police State' and nanny-state mentality New Labour have left us with and revoke 'catch-all' laws which are largely political in nature.
Hysterical Nonsense - Or Is It?
I seem to remember that when this Act was a Bill going through Parliament, predictions of cases such as these were dismissed, by some, as hysterical nonsense.
I very vaguely remember, back when the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 amended the Protection of Children Act 1978 to criminalise possession of indecent pseudo-photographs of children, there was concern that this was a step towards criminalising possession of drawings and the like. Such predictions might have sounded like hysterical nonsense at the time, but, fifteen years later, we have Section 62 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 criminalising possession of such things as cartoons.
Other "hysterical" predictions yet to come true:-
* Possession of extreme pornographic writing will be criminalised. (That's already been called for in Parliament, hasn't it?)
* Possession of written child pornography (quite broadly defined) will be criminalised (criminalising many possessors of teenage diaries that include sexually explicit material). (Again, that's already been called for in Parliament, if I remember correctly.)
* The relevant age for appearing in pornography for that pornography to be legal will be raised to 21, in order to protect those who are under 18 but who can pass for those over 18. This will also be said to close the existing "loophole" that allows porn distributors to "get around the law" by selling "teen porn" by exploiting teenagers who happen to be 18 or 19.
* Possession of all images of children will eventually be criminalised, unless the possessor can show good reason for possession, in order to stop paedophiles "getting around the law" by exploiting the "loophole" that allows them to possess images of children that aren't in any way indecent or pornographic.
I'm sure there are plenty of other "hysterical" predictions, but those are the only ones I can think of right now.
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