Re: [sudo-discuss] Revenge Porn

Yo's- Re. Eddan's & Sonja's question, "what currently legal behavior does this prohibit?" At present it's entirely legal to consensually record oneself & partner having sex, and then non-consensually publish the recording on a site where the associated verbiage has the direct effect of exposing the victim to emotional abuse from members of the general public. This is what the statute seeks to prohibit. The statute Eddan quoted below isn't the revenge porn (RP) statute, it's a different one that refers to recording people without/against their consent in times/places where by definition there is a reasonable expectation of privacy (bedrooms, bathrooms, and the like). In the 1980s, stalking was also a new area of the law, and liberty issues were raised about anti-stalking laws. Prior to that time, all a victim could do was get a restraining order or try to have a stalker charged with trespassing. Over the past 30 years those issues have been settled with no adverse effect on liberty. Just to be clear what we're dealing with, here are a couple of articles about Hunter Moore, whose RP site made news (beware, reading this stuff may make you want to vomit): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17784232 http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/05/revenge-porn Forbes raises the Anthony Weiner issue but that's clearly irrelevant: the California law excludes "selfies" or photos one takes of oneself. Weiner's photos were selfies, thus excluded from protection. Case closed, no hypothetical here. The main problem I have with the statute as written, is "intent." Proving intent can be notoriously difficult. What I would prefer is to prohibit the act itself of publishing, without consent to publish, any recording made in a place/time where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Not just bedrooms and bathrooms, but any area of a private residence or private vehicle. If you have a vulnerable conversation with someone in their living room or in their car or on a tandem bicycle, the fact that it was not a bedroom and you were not naked, should not abrogate your expectation of privacy. (I'll happily debate this issue in a separate thread.) In fact the two-party recording notification laws in many states already cover this aspect, though they are not sufficient by themselves to stop RP. Consent to record, by itself (such as where someone consents to their partner recording them having sex), does not also constitute consent to publish. These are two different things, that need to be addressed separately. Press articles on the RP statute refer to opposition by the ACLU. I searched on Ixquick and DuckDuckGo (privacy-protected search engines that don't search you in return) and found nothing; I searched ACLU.org and found nothing. So if anyone can find an ACLU statement on this, please post a link. Re. "speech" claims in regard to RP: The attribution of person-rights to "speech" is analogous to the attribution of person-rights to corporations, and muddies the issue. A corporation is not a natural person, it's a legal entity formed to conduct business. "Speech" is not a person, it's an act performed by persons, or the product of such an act. Words, images, and so on, do not spontaneously come into existence: they are created by persons. "Freedom of speech" is the unalienable right of persons to speak (publish, etc.), subject only to the rarest and most limited restrictions, such as against child pornography. And here the issue of RP comes home to roost: Child pornography is banned precisely because a child cannot give legal consent, and recording or publication in the absence of consent is a form of harm with an identifiable victim. The deep structure of RP statutes is the same principle, that non-consensuality is a form of harm against an identifiable victim. The a-priori "_cannot_ give consent" and the empirical "_did not_ give consent" have the same effect: no consent is/was given, and harm was done. The RP statute does not apply to "selfies" or if the person gives consent to be published (as with consenting adult porn). It does not apply if the person is not identifiable from the published material, a more liberal provision than with regard to child porn. It only applies if the person is identifiable and does not give consent. That is as minimal a restraint on the right of a person to publish an image or video, as could possibly be enacted. As with anti-stalking laws, over the course of time it will become clear that no liberty interest, and no unalienable right, is involved here. -G. ===== On 13-10-09-Wed 11:42 AM, Sonja Trauss wrote: