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'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

bbc.co.uk

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Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#21

Post by chilldream »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
k-mcgrady wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK users didn't actually upload content to the site. They submitted it and then Mr Moore or someone else posted it. I'm also pretty sure he wouldn't honour take down requests.

Is there a large chasm between "upload content" and "submit [content]"? Is the difference in the latter case just that someone clicks "ok, post this"? I don't think that a quality-review (or lesser, a mechanism to queue and release content to the site slowly over time) turns user-generated-content into site-generated-content. If Youtube did a quality review, it would still be UGC. If Youtube did a post-facto quality…

Not a lawyer, but it seems like posting the content yourself could ruin a Section 230 defense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...

Also, I'm not sure why a quality-review process would lessen culpability if all the illegal stuff gets through anyway.

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#22

Post by chilldream »

adamors wrote: post #16
billpg wrote: post #14

I don't see this as a free speech issue. If you want to put a website with pictures of yourself naked, that's fine by me. You do not get to make that decision on my behalf.

Exactly! What people forget is that most of this "user generated" content is being uploaded without the consent of the persons in the pictures.

One interesting angle some people have taken in the absence of RP-specific laws is to make copyright claims (since a lot of the pictures are either outright stolen, or self-taken and then later uploaded by angry exes)

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#23

Post by IgorPartola »

josephlord wrote: post #19
billpg wrote: post #14

I don't see this as a free speech issue. If you want to put a website with pictures of yourself naked, that's fine by me. You do not get to make that decision on my behalf.

That doesn't make it not a free speech issue. It is a free speech issue but one that we come down on the restricted speech side of things. It is just that it one of the issues that illustrates that some limits on free speech are appropriate and correct. Once that is acknowledged the tricky discussion of where that line should be and how it should enforced come into play.

Is it not copyright infringement? You post my pictures without my consent, I send a takedown notice, you refuse, I call the FBI.

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#24

Post by onetwofiveten »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
k-mcgrady wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK users didn't actually upload content to the site. They submitted it and then Mr Moore or someone else posted it. I'm also pretty sure he wouldn't honour take down requests.

Is there a large chasm between "upload content" and "submit [content]"? Is the difference in the latter case just that someone clicks "ok, post this"? I don't think that a quality-review (or lesser, a mechanism to queue and release content to the site slowly over time) turns user-generated-content into site-generated-content. If Youtube did a quality review, it would still be UGC. If Youtube did a post-facto quality…

I don't think his website would have existed if he had honoured takedown requests. The entire premise was that these pictures are hosted without permission (and according to the Jezebel article about 90% were). If he honoured DMCA requests then that would become widely known pretty quickly. Part of the point of the site was to publicly humiliate the women, so if they had any easy way to get rid of the pictures, it wouldn't have had the same impact.

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#25

Post by leephillips »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
k-mcgrady wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK users didn't actually upload content to the site. They submitted it and then Mr Moore or someone else posted it. I'm also pretty sure he wouldn't honour take down requests.

Is there a large chasm between "upload content" and "submit [content]"? Is the difference in the latter case just that someone clicks "ok, post this"? I don't think that a quality-review (or lesser, a mechanism to queue and release content to the site slowly over time) turns user-generated-content into site-generated-content. If Youtube did a quality review, it would still be UGC. If Youtube did a post-facto quality…

'Is there a large chasm between "upload content" and "submit [content]"?'

There would have to be the most enormous chasm, because the latter includes every publication that uses the work of freelancers, which is pretty much every newspaper and magazine, and their online equivalents, everywhere.

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#26

Post by tseabrooks »

IgorPartola wrote: post #23
josephlord wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make it not a free speech issue. It is a free speech issue but one that we come down on the restricted speech side of things. It is just that it one of the issues that illustrates that some limits on free speech are appropriate and correct. Once that is acknowledged the tricky discussion of where that line should be and how it should enforced come into play.

Is it not copyright infringement? You post my pictures without my consent, I send a takedown notice, you refuse, I call the FBI.

Serious question. If you consent today to let me take pictures of you nude... Don't I own the copyright of those pictures? Now, presumably if you and I were dating your consent would be very casual... I'd say, "Hey, mind if I snap some photos" and you'd say, "Go right ahead"... Because I'm quite charming.

A year later I still have these photos and we're not dating any longer. Do I own copyright on photos as the photographer? How far does your casual consent go? Do I need formal consent saying I can reproduce them?

A photo journalist will take a photo of a couple in the park as a child plays in the fountain behind them and use it in the paper the next day. What consent do they need to get from those being photographed?

It just all feels very fuzzy. Presumably most of the nude pictures are taken by someone other than the subject of the photos... meaning the photographer owns the copyright.. I'd think.

Anyone have more info on how this actually plays out?

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#28

Post by adamors »

tseabrooks wrote: post #26
IgorPartola wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not copyright infringement? You post my pictures without my consent, I send a takedown notice, you refuse, I call the FBI.

Serious question. If you consent today to let me take pictures of you nude... Don't I own the copyright of those pictures? Now, presumably if you and I were dating your consent would be very casual... I'd say, "Hey, mind if I snap some photos" and you'd say, "Go right ahead"... Because I'm quite charming. A year later I still have these photos and we're not dating any longer. Do I own copyright on photos as the photo…

I don't think it's that fuzzy, because even if you gave consent at one point to be photographed naked, that doesn't mean that the person having access to the photos can do anything they want with them. I mean it's one thing to send a nude pic in a sext and it's another to upload the pic to the internet with all your personal information.

There was a great interview about this last year in a Canadian radio show: http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2013/06/13/end-revenge-porn/

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#29

Post by girvo »

tseabrooks wrote: post #26
IgorPartola wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not copyright infringement? You post my pictures without my consent, I send a takedown notice, you refuse, I call the FBI.

Serious question. If you consent today to let me take pictures of you nude... Don't I own the copyright of those pictures? Now, presumably if you and I were dating your consent would be very casual... I'd say, "Hey, mind if I snap some photos" and you'd say, "Go right ahead"... Because I'm quite charming. A year later I still have these photos and we're not dating any longer. Do I own copyright on photos as the photo…

The law surrounding the intersection of copyright, photography, and the internet (with user generated content and Safe Harbour thrown in for good measure) is indeed fuzzy. Honestly, I don't know whether there exists any hard and fast rules per se. When you have so many laws together and sometimes in conflict with one another... I don't know. It's difficult.

Re: 'Revenge porn' website former owner Hunter Moore arrested

#30

Post by bmelton »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #2

Should it be illegal to operate a website that hosts user-generated content, some of which is illegal, if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence? The answer is pretty clearly "no." But this position becomes more difficult to defend when the entire premise of the website is based on illegal content. Something like e.g. if YouTube was originally named ShareMusicIllegally.…

> On the other hand, this website was clearly vile.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

H.L. Mencken

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