Before the passage of the Act, the law on publishing obscene materials was governed by the common-law case of R v Hicklin, which had no exceptions for artistic merit or the public good.

During the 1950s, the Society of Authors formed a committee to recommend reform of the existing law, submitting a draft bill to the Home Office in February 1955.

The common law, as established in R v Hicklin [1868] 3 QB 360, set the test of "obscenity" as "whether the tendency of the letter published is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influence and into whose hands the publication might fall"; the 1857 Act allowed any stipendiary magistrate or any two Justices of the Peace to issue a warrant authorising the police to search for, seize, and destroy any obscene publications.

After the prosecution of several notable publishers, the Society of Authors formed a committee (with Norman St John-Stevas as legal advisor) to recommend reform of the existing law, submitting their proposals and a draft bill to the Home Office in February 1955.

Comprising censors and reformers, the committee made mixed recommendations, both conservative (further powers of search and seizure for the police) and liberal (the use of expert evidence attesting to the work's artistic merit).

[6] The committee's proposals were published in March 1958, and a new bill was introduced under the Ten Minute Rule, failing to gain the requisite support.

[16] Section 2(5) creates a defence of "innocent dissemination"; if the publisher can prove that they did not anticipate any obscenity problems, and did not examine the article in question for such issues, they cannot be convicted.

[16] This section allows a Justice of the Peace, if satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to believe obscene publications are kept on certain premises for profit, to issue a warrant for that location.

[23] The book, which contained the use of the words "fuck" and "cunt" multiple times, along with sexual scenes, was banned completely in England and Wales until the conclusion of the trial; by the mid-1980s, it was on the school syllabus.

[26] Graham Lord wrote that the case "was the first trumpet call of the permissive society, the moment many believe that British morality, manners and family life began seriously to deteriorate".

[28] When the exhibition opened it was allegedly visited by a local school group, the leader of which objected to an image depicting a woman performing manual sex on a man.

The case was later cited in the report of a working party convened in 1968, under the chairmanship of John Montgomerie, by the Arts Council of Great Britain, to review the obscenity laws in England and Wales.

Oz was an underground magazine with a circulation of 40,000 which aimed to challenge the "older generation's outdated beliefs and standards of behaviour and morality".

The published version was 48 pages long, with the front consisting of a sheet from the French erotic book Desseins Erotiques, which depicted four naked women performing sex acts.

Thirdly, the courts held in Straker v DPP [1963] 1 QB 926 that negatives for photographs could not be forfeited if it was not intended to publish them, regardless of their obscene nature.

[50] The National Campaign for the Repeal of the Obscene Publications Acts (NCROPA) was set up in 1976 by the actor David Webb; it operated until the late 1990s.

Suggestions given by the Crown Prosecution Service included: Nevertheless the Act continued to have a significant impact in English law for many years, with its precedents serving to provide a definition of obscenity that were used in other legal contexts.

The guidelines also clarified that material that is purposefully obscene can be justified as in the public good if it is "in the interests of science, literature, art or learning".