Revenge porn site founder loses $250k defamation suit

  > frustrated him to the point where he'd represent victims pro bono. "I want to hurt them bad," he wrote. "If anyone out there has been scammed by these crooks, contact me."

Presumably there's more in the pipeline.

"In professional wrestling, kayfabe (pronounced /ˈkeɪfeɪb/) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true," specifically the portrayal of competition and rivalries between participants as being genuine or not of a worked nature. "[1]

Was "kayabe" a new word for anyone else? The wikipedia article is remarkably long for a word I had never heard of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

Yes, they're real. Ars has done some good articles on them, particularly IsAnyoneDown. Ex-boyfriends post sext pics online, ex-girlfriends then pay "independent" lawyers to take the pics down, it's a brilliant racket.

These ones do appear to be real. I don't know HOW, due to the reasons you give. Most sites that claim to be revenge porn are "fake" (in the sense that - thankfully - everyone in the videos has consented). You can tell 'cos the submit page requests signatures and documentation from all people in the film.

Hunter Moore at one point operated a website dedicated to posting pornographic images, ostensibly without the permission of the participants. (I say ostensibly because as far as I know it hasn't gone to court. The media coverage certainly implied that permission was lacking.) He used the presence of other, more legitimate pornography to defend the site but in my opinion legitimacy wasn't really his goal. (His new website's selling point is identifying information.)

As a free-speech advocate I'm leery of defamation lawsuits in general, but (again, in my opinion) Moore has gone well past the point of being merely 'offensive' and moved on to actively endangering other people for no reason. Accusing someone of possessing child pornography because you don't like them is getting pretty close to the line as well. So I don't have much sympathy.

please read the article ... at least.

"Revenge porn" is posting pornographic pictures of your exes (or other people of whom you have such pictures, and don't have permission to post it publicly). The idea being that you shame your exes by posting your dirty photos of them from when you were dating. Apparently the sites also include real names and hometowns of the people posted, or in some cases even addresses and phone numbers, to increase the chances of them being embarrassed by people who know them finding the pictures.

This particular defamation suit has nothing to do with revenge porn per se. It just happens that the founder of a revenge porn website is a huge asshole, and started making (presumably) baseless accusations of pedophilia against someone who campaigns against cyber bullying and who helped shut down his first revenge porn site. The details are a bit more complicated, but that's the gist.

So the defamation lawsuit is about his pedophilia accusation, not anything directly to do with the revenge porn sites, though I think there are some other pending privacy lawsuits about them too.

Not sure why this was downvoted, it may not be nice but it is fairly accurate.

Ex-girlfriend/boyfriend posting nude photos of their ex.

I think Moore claimed it was legal if the person submitting the photos actually took the photo, as they held the copyright, and even if they didn't he was protected under DMCA.

But it (the judgement) has nothing to do with revenge porn; it's about a tweet that the scumbag made, accusing someone of having child porn.

The world is not divided into scumbags and non-scumbags.

Scumbags all around in this case, unfortunately. The lawyer representing the other party in this case installs malware on the computers of people trying to pirate (one of his other) client's porn. The malware demands a paid settlement on a timer or it will lock access to the computer.

I shit you not.

It's an issue of copyright which means at best its a DMCA violation as long as he filled out his forms and registered his agent.

The owner of the site is in all likelihood not very liable and as long as he complies with the DMCA it's unlikely to go to a higher court where the whole concept of the site could be shutdown.

The whole defamation thing is silly as the 'antibullying' people really pose little risk to the site.