The court was asked whether a person who provides screen images derived from a video tape ‘publish[es] an obscene article’ contrary to section 2 of the 1959 Act.
Held: Such a publication came within the Act. The court rejected the defendants’ arguments that an offence under section 2 was only committed when a conventional i.e. celluloid film was ‘shown, played or projected’ onto a screen. The article was a video cassette containing magnetised tape. When it was played, electric signals caused images to be displayed on the screen. The system ‘did not involve the projection of light onto a screen’. The cassette was an article which produced pictures or sounds within the embrace of the Act. The words ‘play or project’, if not ‘show’ also, in section 1(3)(b) of the Act were wide enough to cover what happens when pictures are produced by this means.
Lawton LJ said: ‘the word ‘project’ would be apt to cover what happens when a video cassette was brought into use, because what is happening is that the electrical impulses recorded on the video tape are thrown onto the television screen by means of the use of an electric current. In ordinary parlance, they are projected on to the television screen.’ The Court recognised that it ‘should be slow to apply the words to a piece of electronic equipment which probably had not been within the contemplation of Parliament’ . . ‘but if the clear words of the statute are sufficiently wide to cover the kind of electronic device with which we are concerned in this case, the fact that that particular form of electronic device was not in the contemplation of Parliament in 1959 is an immaterial consideration. In any event in 1959 Parliament would almost certainly have had in mind the fact that electronic equipment for reproducing words and pictures was something likely to come about in the near future. In those circumstances it is not all that improbable that words were chosen which were wide enough to embrace any developments in the electronic field. But speculation as to what Parliament had in mind and what it probably had not got in mind is neither here nor there. It is the duty of this Court to consider the wording of the Act and to construe the words in it (if they are words of ordinary English usage) in the ways in which they would have been understood by ordinary literate persons at the material time, namely 1959’.
Judges:
Lawton LJ
Citations:
(1980) 72 Cr App R 71, [1981] 1 WLR 88
Statutes:
Obscene Publications Act 1959 1(2) 2
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Regina v Fellows, Arnold CACD 27-Sep-1996
Computer based digital images are ‘copies of a photograph’ sufficient for the Act, and so possession of digital entities capable of being transformed into images were such photographs. Making a file available for download, was sufficient to amount . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Crime
Updated: 07 May 2022; Ref: scu.229853