Err.. no.

Firstly, the copyright of the pictures is almost always likely to reside with the person taking the pictures who is often the one sharing them.

Secondly, in many/most jurisdictions many/most forms of copyright violation fall under civil, not criminal law. However, this is a criminal act and the penalty should be much higher.

Who said anything about "sending" pictures? I think you've confused this with sexting.

Your girl/boyfriend takes a photo of you nude. Then they post it online without your consent. Are you okay with this?

What? This is not a simple copyright violation this is a sexual violation. I don't want to see someone go to jail for uploading a movie, fines are a sufficient punishment. But if you expose someone online like this you're not reducing their profits you're deeply injuring a person that once trusted you. There is little hope of ever removing a photo like this once in the public internet, these women need all the protection the law can give.

Rubbish. Copyright rests with the photographer. That's going to be the person uploading, not the person in the photo. In the case of an abusive relationship consent to be photographed probably doesn't exist either (and is not relevant for copyright as I understand)

In the case of photos of two or more copyright becomes even more inappropriate.

Given some of the news pieces about revenge porn, from both sides of the Atlantic, this seems a very sensible addition.

Well, abuse then.

How do you define "violence" ? According to [0] I would have thought that sharing intimate pictures could very well be psychologically harmful and therefore would be a form of abuse. While I'm not sure what the legal definition of violence is (different per country I imagine) I'd imagine that abuse is a kind of violence.

Besides anything else, surely a basic moral compass suggests this is wrong, and on a different part of the spectrum to "copyright infringement"

[0] http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/psychological-abuse/

There's such a thing as "Psychological violence". Violence is not just punches and kicks.

In fact pshycial force is only one of several definitions of violence in the dictionary ("rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment") which also includes things such as: "roughly or immoderately vehement or ardent" and "intense in force, effect, etc.; severe; extreme" for "violence".

It's emotional violence. It's effectively a sexual assault by voyeurism that can be re-committed each time the image is viewed and amplified each time it's passed around. In the typical case of an image being passed around a school, the victim feels sexually assaulted by literally everyone they know, and may face sexist administrative consequences as well, and often dies by suicide.

I honestly find it disturbing you don't see that or don't care.

Modern society and the law, seeing women as particularly vulnerable and in need of protection, recognize forms of violence against women that need not involve physical contact or threat of physical contact. Calling a woman a "bitch" can, in some cases, be considered violence against her because it is implicitly threatening.

Indeed, and it's ridiculous that you need to tell people that.

So if it's not violence...why is it illegal and why should it carry a serious jail sentence?

Everytime you ask the law to regulate something, you open the jar of unintended consequences.

You complain about the government and yet you want to give them more power and responsibility.

Honestly, this revenge porn shit is a moral hysteria that's one of the many tools of spectacle. If this much hysteria were used for something like "Make sure daytime workers receive 30 minutes of sunlight light a day", it'd probably be more effective towards human happiness and productivity.

Oh well.