The Federal Trade Commission has barred a man from posting nude images of women to his website without their express written consent, the agency announced today.
The man, Craig Brittain, is alleged to not only have used deceptive practices to gather the images, but also to have solicited payments from the women to have the pictures removed from his site. Brittain will be required to destroy the images as well as personal information he collected while running the site.
Posting nude images of people without their knowledge and consent—generally referred to as “revenge porn”—has become a hot button issue in recent years, as lawmakers and law enforcement struggle to find ways to curb the practice.
University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks, who has proposed federal laws against revenge porn, says the FTC’s ruling is extremely significant. “It demonstrates that the federal government recognizes the severe harm that non-consensual pornography causes and that it is prepared to punish its purveyors harshly,” she told us in an email. “The ruling sends the strong message that the federal government is on the side of the victims and potential victims of this malicious conduct.”
However, the FTC’s case against Brittain was based on his violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which bars deceptive practices, not federal criminal law. “Revenge porn as such is not a federal crime yet,” Franks says.
According to the complaint, Brittain tricked people into sending him photos in various ways, including posing as a woman on Craigslist and offering to swap nude photos of himself for photos of the women. The site then advertised services that charged women $200 to $500 to have the photos removed.
“Despite presenting these as third-party services, the complaint alleges that the sites for these services were owned and operated by Brittain,” according to the FTC’s announcement.
This the second time the federal government has gotten involved in a revenge porn case. Last year, the FBI arrested Hunter Moore, who ran a site dedicated to revenge porn. But Moore wasn’t indicted for revenge porn in and of itself, but for allegedly paying someone to hack into victims computers to steal the images.
States such as Arizona and New Jersey have passed controversial laws that explicitly forbid revenge porn, and Franks has argued that federal laws are needed to ban revenge porn outright. But opponents of such laws, such as Sarah Jeong, argue that over broad laws will lead to unintended consequences, and that existing laws—such as requirements that porn publishers keep records on their models, copyright protections, and extortion laws—already give women options for stopping revenge porn. For example, posting someone else’s selfie is a copyright violation, because photographers own the rights to their photos.
Still others, such as Kevin Conneran, writing for the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology, point out that merely forcing websites to remove unauthorized photos after the damage has already been done does little to discourage men from publishing those images in the first place. In other words, we haven’t heard the last of this debate.
Update 1/29/2015 at 8:20 PM EST: This story has been updated to clarify that Brittain was found to be in in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act, but not in violation of criminal law.
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