P.S. I do wonder sometimes if people bother to read the attached stories, or just the BoingBoing blurbs before commenting. The original article states two things that make a clear case for why this is all about Right to Privacy. First, it mentions that the court felt “intimate material should be deleted - if one of the ex-partners asked for it to be.” So, it’s not just as a general rule for all exes to follow, but only upon the demand. Second, it states that the court, “also decided that the woman’s ex-partner did not need to delete the photos and films that show the woman clothed.” That’s because those images were, to the court’s perception, not compromising, and could therefore, not harm the woman.
In fact, here’s exactly why the court ruled the way it did. The court said, “Consent to use and own privately recorded nude pictures, could in this instance be withdrawn on the grounds of personal rights, which are valued higher than the ownership rights of the photographer.” Yep, privacy (more specifically “public disclosure of private facts”) was placed over property (copyright).
I too would like to live in that world. I’d also like a million dollars and a pony. Sadly, we have to live in the world we’ve got, not the one we want.
There was a time when no one would have thought of having someone take a photo of them in a compromised situation. After all, it would be seen and probably copied, down at the drug store when the film was developed.
If you don’t want those pics of you naked to become public, don’t engage in kinky stuff in the first place.
Don’t blame the revenge seeking Ex. Blame yourself for your poor judgement for allowing the photos to be taken. Even if an Ex never publishes the photos, the photos still exist and can fall into the wrong hands when a computer or camera is stolen or junked.
…but we live in a world where we want to blame others for our problems and want laws enacted to save us from our own stupidity.
I’m sure people have been taking intimate photos of their lovers for as long as there have been cameras (though I can’t swear to it) and I know they have been taking intimate videos of their lovers for as long as there have been video cameras.
Perhaps there was a time when having taken the picture or video would have been nearly as scandalous as letting it be taken. For some reason (I’m going to go with “men will be men” evolving to the state it has), that’s no longer the case.
If someone trusts their partner enough to let them take intimate photos of them (or gets pressured by their partner into allowing it–which I think is exceptionally likely in the case of people whose photos are spread around later), when that relationship breaks up, the partner with the photos should have the decency not to publish them.
Blaming the people photographed is terrible. They didn’t do anything wrong.
They get a double whammy of having been betrayed by a former lover in a society which is prudish and hell bent on blaming the victim of these kind of attacks.
I’m curious what word they’ll use for the official legal break-up of an unmarried couple. Divorce-ish? Do you have to prove that part, or just declare that you’ve broken up?
There is a difference between public behavior and private, and if you value personal privacy (think companies keeping a lot of data on your shopping and correlating that to personal life changes or the government collecting phone records) then the moral action is to delete the photos. In private you hold your private self in common in a relationship and if there are photos in private then it is not for the rest of the world, they should only exist to the extent that the relationship does - just like just because you had sex with someone once consensually that does not mean you get have to have sex with them in the future.
Now if they were having sex in public and photos were taken then the owner of the photos is the photographer.
Steering clear of the legal and moral thoughts around this which I am still trying to work out for myself, can we give a little thought to the following –
The Egyptians tried to do this over 3 millennia ago, by deleting the names of those they no longer favoured from cartouches, on all sorts of monuments that took thousands and thousands of hours to chisel! And yet somehow, a few of them always survived…
How could this possibly ever be complied with in the age of cloud storage, the mobile phone and the selfie?
Oh, and if it includes all copies… Then how do you get the NSA to delete the ones that they are holding on your behalf?
Intimate photographs is one of the few places where I can see a legitimate application for DRM. Make it so my lover and I can see each others pictures only as long as we have each other’s permission. Maybe it would need a dedicated screen, that would be kind of romantic. Then if and when we broke up, we could either release the images or fail to renew permissions. It might make it easier to to take such pictures if it were harder to view them.
The actual removal of the photos as a practical reality isn’t possible, perhaps, but the application of damages should certainly act as a deterrent, and also recompense for the victim.
There was an episode of Law and Order a while back (there are probably more legit ways to come by this information, but…) whose theme was the damage caused by the sharing of pornographic pictures of children. In the case, initially, damages were being drawn initially from each and every person who had the photos, or shared, but in the end, they ended up going after the original sharer fro damages, under a law that demanded that the onus was on the original sharer to recoup the damages from the others, not on the victim.
Your lack of logic (think sweetie, you have to have been able read the statement to have selected and responded to it in that fashion) is only surpassed by your fine taste in film. Amused, but only just.
Probably just something like “partnership”. In articles discussing the case that caused the law to be reviewed, the couple was termed “ex-partners”. It doesn’t say they were married. More than likely they’ll need to establish a timeline for the relationship (start-to-end with date approximations) and may need to disclose current living/relationship situations.
HMSGoose got it right. This law is designed, not to punish after the fact (because you can’t make a person whole again once their image has been spread and reputation damaged), but instead to pro-actively cause the exes to give over their copies without having to aggressively enforce the law at all.
There is no real way to ensure that every copy has been destroyed, but by letting an ex know that they are expected to have destroyed them, it does allow for greater punishment if they use a pic after the fact. Then they won’t have just damaged a reputation, they’ll also have gone against the court order. That means fines start piling up. It becomes cheaper to just key an ex’s car.
If anyone photographs you naked for any reason ever, expect it to end up online and someone to get off on it.
Man, that’s patently untrue. The existence of the internet does not negate one’s ability to trust others. I have photos. They’re not gonna end up online. Ever.
I was speaking in hyperbole, of course, but trust can be betrayed, sometimes even unwittingly.
First off, clearly people trust others enough to allow them to take this kind of photo in the first place. In every case, one would assume the subject of the photograph legitimately believes the person they allow to photograph them would never, not ever let that photo get on the internet - otherwise, why would they allow them to take the photo?
Yet the fact that countless photographs of this nature end up online proves that clearly many, many people misplace their trust - even despite the fact that, at the time of the taking of such a photo, the concept is unthinkable to them.
But one need not misjudge the character of the person whom you entrust such materials with for it to end up online. Digital devices are not intrinsically secure - there are countless ways a digital photograph can end up somewhere an unscrupulous intruder might get a hold of it. People in general are bad about securing their data, and it’s startlingly easy to put sensitive information in reach of any opportunitstic scumbag who might want to nab it, both virtually and physically.
