Here’s a hypothetical for you: intimate photos of yourself you believed to be private are suddenly made available to Internet users. In the span of an hour, the material is shared among millions of users. This nightmare scenario ultimately proved reality for dozens of high-profile women within the entertainment industry.
Multiple family celebrities became the latest victims of a violation in privacy. The incident, currently under national investigation, stems from the actions of an anonymous hacker. The hacker raided private cloud storage accounts and leaked their content to a worldwide audience.
Victims of the breach have already vocalized a determinedness to find the anonymous hacker responsible. Some legal experts believe the best weapon currently available for combating the further spread of the private materials is copyright law.
Domestically, copyrights are appointed to the individual whom originally captured the photo. The vast majority of photos in the recent leak were self-portraits, meaning the women behind the camera should retain copyright privilege.
Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) earlier in 1998. The measure was designed to stiffen penalties for violations of copyright that occurred online. This piece of legislation could prevent the explicit material from being hosted altogether.
In accordance with the “Safe Harbor” provision, websites like YouTube and Facebook are not responsible for predetermining copyright violation exists among content submitted by users – instead these domains are responsible for ‘takedowns’, removing reported content that violates copyright.
Individuals who find their copyright has been violated can pursue legal action in the form of lawsuits, pressuring sites that host the material to remove the content or pay millions in damages.
Although the strategy might prove effective in this happenstance, other legal critics suggest it’s the equivalent of legal ‘whack-a-mole’ – there are no shortage of copyright violators online willing to host private images.