United States of America

[US] You Got Posted & Revenge Porn

IRIS 2014-6:1/40

Jonathan Perl

Locus Telecommunications, Inc.

After a complaint filed on 10 December 2013, California authorities arrested a California resident for running a “revenge porn” website, charging him with 31 felony counts that include conspiracy, identity theft, and extortion. According to the complaint, the website, which is no longer operational, let people anonymously post explicit pictures of others and charged $350 to remove pictures. While the arrest comes on the heels of a first-in-the-nation law that California enacted to combat “revenge porn” websites the defendant was not charged under the newly-enacted law because it is geared towards those who post the incriminating pictures and not those who run websites that feature them.

On 18 March 2014, the founders of the website were also recently ordered by an Ohio Federal court to pay $385,000 to a woman for distributing sexually-explicit images of her on the website when she was 16 years old. The payments include $150,000 for posting two pictures of her that were deemed to be child pornography, $10,000 for violating her “right of publicity” and $75,000 for punitive damages. The plaintiff’s attorney lauded the decision for sending an unambiguous message to people who run revenge porn sites, and allowing the victim to “obtain justice against the people who exploited her.”


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This article has been published in IRIS Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory.