Vivaldi: Corrupter of the Youth.
The problem with the Act is that phrases such as "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character", and even with such limiting precedent as "a message is 'grossly offensive' if it was likely to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates" is that it's they're largely in the eye of the beholder no matter how extreme they are.
It also opens up the law to stupid contradictions.
For example: The term 'menace' is a term used in law which tends to imply that there must be some high degree of coercion in order to force an individual to undertake a particular course of action (http://www.inbrief.co.uk/blackmail.htm). I consider taking someone to court a fairly coercive course of action. Therefore I consider legally threatening emails to be menacing. Does this mean I could have the sender of a legitimate but legally threatening email prosecuted under the Act?
It's even worse with words like 'obscene' or 'indecent'. To be obscene something needs to "tend to deprave and corrupt" (http://www.inbrief.co.uk/freedom-of-expression.htm), but what if I don't have the same kind of philosophical system-of-morals approach beloved of Victorian England? What if I don't consider there to be such a thing as a singular moral path which can be denoted as 'the good'? What does the word 'deprave' mean in those circumstances? Does it even have a purpose?
The word 'corrupt' is even worse. Corruption is the means by which something is changed from a "sound condition to an unsound one, spoiled, contaminated, rotten, deteriorated from the normal or standard" (see previous reference). For there to be corruption in the legal sense there has to be a normal, sound, or standard 'state'. Judges rely on the idea that such a thing exists, but I have my doubts that this idea would stand up to any thoroughgoing scientific investigation. What is considered 'normal or standard' varies from population to population, from person to person and from time to time.
In addition perfectly innocuous events can be shown to 'corrupt' via arguments such as the following:
1) Your actions are upsetting me.
2) My normal state is to not be upset.
3) My being upset constitutes a deterioration of my normal state.
4) One kind of corruption causes a deterioration from one's normal state.
C) Thus your actions are a corrupting influence.
I can use this argument to prove that Vivaldi's music constitutes a corrupting influence, thus:
1) Vivaldi's music make me cry like a child.
2) My normal state is that of not crying.
3) My crying constitutes a deterioration of my normal state.
4) One kind of corruption causes a deterioration from one's normal state.
C) Thus the aforementioned music constitutes a corrupting influence.
All of which proves:
a) You can use Aristotelian logic to prove any bollocks you like;
b) The legal definitions of 'corruption', 'depraved' and 'obscence' are as leaky as a colander.
On top of all that - what if you consider someone's attempts to stop you indulging in your chosen trolling behaviour as "grossly offensive, or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character"? Can you prosecute the state for pursuing the law using that self-same law?
All this is food for thought when thinking about 'taming the Internets' and while I'm tempted to say I don't think this particular conviction constitutes a major miscarriage of justice (the guy was quite clearly being a twat and was stupid enough to distribute posters of himself saying "I'm a twat!!!!LOL!1") I'm wary of doing so because there's a voice at the back of my mind that keeps saying "thin end of the wedge, thin end of the wedge ..."
That same voice leads me to believe that being a twat can be funny: David Thorne, Chris Morris, Jeremy Beadle, Lenny Bruce all made their careers from offending people. OK, so Jeremy Beadle's not funny, but you get my point. So at what point does humour become an offence under the Act? When the average non-existent man says so, apparently. And now we're back to where we started.
Say, is that Nigel Kennedy on the radio?