The acquittal of Michael Peacock on six counts of obscene publication is a milestone in British Law because it challenges the idea that legal conclusions should be based on morality rather than consent. Peacock advertised and sold DVDs featuring BDSM between consenting adults. The police deemed that 6 of the titles were obscene and prosecuted him under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. The decision to acquit, delivered on Friday 6 January, was unanimous.

The OPA 1959, as Nichi Hodgson writes in the Guardian, “is nothing to do with prosecuting the potential or actual sexual or violent harm caused to others by the material in question, nor about preventing children or vulnerable adults being subjected to inappropriately explicit material. It simply and absolutely passes moral judgment. Thank god the jury had sense to see that in 2012, telling others what is depraved – and prosecuting them for “debasing” your mind if they publish material featuring it and you are privy to it, is as absurd as it is anachronistic”.

It is ridiculous for an act to be legal to perform and not legal to depict. It is this sort of chicanery that makes a mockery of the law.

Myles Jackman, a solicitor with a specialist interest in obscenity law, said: “The jury’s verdict is a significant victory for common sense suggesting that the OPA has been rendered irrelevant in the digital age. Normal jurors did not consider representations of consensual adult sexuality would deprave and corrupt the viewer.”

The acts under review – the depiction of kidnap and rape, to take one example – raise other uncomfortable questions, but that is another, far more complex issue, and is separate from the legal implications of this case.

In the end, this is not a gay rights or LGBT rights victory, which is how Hodgson approaches it, but a BDSM one. BDSM was on trial, not homosexuality. BDSM is not exclusively homosexual, after all, even though the content of the DVDs under review featured homosexual BDSM acts.

One last note, when I ran a search through Google the following result was returned (even with Safe Search turned off): “Michael Peac**k’s acquittal is a victory for sexual freedom – Digg”. That is an irony of the internet age.

Further reading regarding the case: New Statesman and the Guardian