For instance, the UK has a cyberflashing law which allots a two year custodial sentence for sending a graphic image (by any means) with intent to cause distress.
That's not to say that Goatse wasn't the correct option in this case.
Fun fact: UK law exists only to make sure that every person in the UK is guilty of something by the time they reach adulthood. It serves no other purpose.
It’s not worth worrying about such extreme what-if cases. If the Feds were so determined to destroy an innocent person in a kangaroo court, there’s easier ways of doing so. They could plant CSAM on the server. They could coerce an informant to accuse you of SA (like they did to Assange).
Realistically, the worst sanction this dev could reasonably expect, is to have their domain taken down. That’s what happened to the OG .cx domain, after all…
Then again, I doubt someone is going to file a police report, especially when the URL of the page would bring the reports to an entirely different web page in the first place.
Ultimately it depends on what he's charged with and if it's found they can be extradited for it...
If you want a good preview of what trying to enforce UK law on US citizens looks like look no further than the New York Libel Terrorism Protection Act later passed federally as the "Speech Act" preventing US courts from enforcing British Libel judgements referring to you lot colloquially as "Libel Terrorists"
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/03/21/394273902/...
Insofar as action purely in the UK well Europe is 10M sq miles the US 3.8M whereas the UK is a 94,000 sq mile island on the way to nothing else.
If they want to commit at minimum thousands of dollars in resources they can at great expense reduce by 1 the potential tourists spending money on their island I suppose.
He's the one specifically replacing one thing with another under some circumstance. Not the person embedding it or the one hosting the image.
https://www.jdspicer.co.uk/site/blog/crime-fraud/uk-indecent...
as there is no cyberflashing on the source website, when you go to verify
that how it ought to be, dunno uk law
It's the reference example for what a "shock image" is. How in the blazes is the choice of that particular image over practically anything else based on anything but its capacity at causing distress?
The blog post both acknowledges it as such, and even says "Let this be a lesson to you", making it clear that its use is specifically meant to be go beyond stopping people and actively punish them. And even if it weren't for that straight up confession, it'd STILL be patently obvious that this is what they are doing. We are in clear-cut "shotgun booby trap" territory here. As others have pointed out, there are subtleties at play over who is ultimately responsible, but the author's intent to cause distress is not in question in any way shape or form.
As much as it's fun to see vigilante retribution like this (and boy is it!), that does not discount the obvious legal exposure at play.
I think goatse (I arrived on the internet in 1992 or so, so yes, I’m familiar with bothe the giver and the receiver) is somewhat conservative, actually, given the full realm of possibilities. I would be prepared to argue that to a jury in the right jurisdiction. I could convince twelve people who don’t care in New Jersey but probably not Mississippi.
I’d be very surprised if any prosecutor thought they’d have a substantial likelihood of a conviction. There is a very high probability that this immature outburst would not be prosecuted or that it would plead to something like disturbing the peace if anything at all.
Goatse is the internet’s way of saying “you don’t really want to look at this.” Hell, your parenthetical says as much.
It would have to start with an extraordinary effort by the UK to invest millions in getting a fellow and then the other nation being willing to set a terrible precedent to get the uk to fuck off.
Given the relative utility it would be easier to cut off the entire UK