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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

#11

Post by makomk »

phpnode wrote: post #6
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the latest legal setback for Mr Moore, who was ordered in March to pay $250,000 (£170,000) in damages for defamation resulting from a civil lawsuit. I may have misunderstood, but didn't this $250k fine originate largely due to the UGC on the website?

no, it's because he accused the owner of an anti bullying charity of being a paedophile - maybe not a great source but - http://www.dailydot.com/news/hunter-moore-revenge-porn-defam...

For values of "anti bullying charity" equal to "company making money from online extortion", but yeah. (Their website Cheaterville has ads for services offering to remove "slanderous" and "defamatory" content from Cheaterville for the fee of $500 per entry. They handle all their advertising inhouse, so at the very least they're entirely aware of where their advertising income's coming from. In fact, at one point those were the only external ads on the entire network of sites and there was no information on how to advertise with them, so they'd obviously cut some kind of private deal with the companies offering these services.)

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

#12

Post by enimodas »

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.…

http://jezebel.com/one-womans-dangerous-war-against-the-most...

this article explains how he was not just hosting a site for user-generated content, and some other difficulties with it.

And hn comments on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6788203

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

#13

Post by rmc »

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.…

In the European Union storing personal data like that has been illegal for many years.

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

#15

Post by sokoloff »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #5
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the latest legal setback for Mr Moore, who was ordered in March to pay $250,000 (£170,000) in damages for defamation resulting from a civil lawsuit. I may have misunderstood, but didn't this $250k fine originate largely due to the UGC on the website?

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 review (to remove copyrighted music), it would still be UGC. ...

Not honoring takedown requests is a different matter, and just sounds like a dumb call.

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

#16

Post by adamors »

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.

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

#17

Post by brown9-2 »

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.…

if you take reasonable steps to remove the illegal content when informed of its existence?

Where are you getting the "reasonable steps" part from this story?

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

#18

Post by bruceboughton »

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…

Yes, because then you are editorialising and lose a lot of safe harbour protections.

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

#19

Post by josephlord »

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.

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

#20

Post by onetwofiveten »

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.…

Websites should be free to host user generated content provided they're not intending to host illegal content. Taking reasonable steps to remove illegal content is only part of that. If the illegal content hosting is the public premise of the site, then that's proof of intent. For me, the distinction is pretty clear. Reddit doesn't allow subreddits devoted to child porn, for example, and I think that's reasonable.

I don't think laws should be applied retroactively, but normally they aren't, and that certainly isn't what happened in this case. The fine was related to a civil case, and the criminal proceedings seem to be related to hacking activity.

Bear in mind that although revenge porn wasn't covered by criminal law until recently, it was always covered by civil law. These photographs count as copyrighted content. According to the Jezebel article, the website owner refused to take down photos even when issued with a DMCA takedown notices. As I understand it, that means the owner was breaking civil law. So it's not really fair to paint him as a law abiding but sketchy businessman. He broke the law, but he got away with it by targeting vulnerable people who didn't sue him because it would have been public, embarrassing and expensive.

Revenge porn isn't a good thing, on balance. The freedom involved isn't worth the damage done, so I'd be happy for it to be illegal to host. However legislation on this has to be very carefully written to only target revenge porn. You wouldn't want someone getting put in jail for torrenting an amateur porn movie.

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