That's what the courts ARE FOR. Are you saying you'd prefer to live in the world where Charlotte flies to Sacramento and calls Hunter out at high noon in a cowboy hat? Because it seems fairly clear the "negotiation" option was a complete non-starter.
Edit: To be clear, I'm aware that some of these victims lost their jobs. I did not mean to suggest there was no harm done. However, they lost their job due to the prudish culture that I originally referred to, not directly by the actions of the villain.
You and I have our beliefs about sexuality, and perhaps any one woman showing up on this website could elect to ignore it. But it's quite clear that Hunter was causing women real harm & suffering, regardless what your or my beliefs about sexuality are. Particularly considering he got people fired. I don't know about you, but someone getting me fired is not some little joke I can ignore.
One clear indication that this is not an appropriate dispute (...) is the fact that she had to rely on awkward legal maneuvers
I disagree. I believe that's a clear indication the legal system is currently catching up to technology, not that the law doesn't belong on the internet.
Perhaps we need to look at this from a different angle. Why can employers fire me for having a naked picture taken? Perhaps we need to roll back no-fault firing as well.
I think the comment was talking about changing social attitude more than anything else if I read it right. If we make it normal to have nude pictures on the Internet, then these sites will automatically lose steam.
Why can people choose not to purchase from Chick-a-Fil because they dislike the anti-gay opinions of the owner? Perhaps we need to roll back no-fault failure to purchase chicken as well.
Meanwhile, back in a free society, people are allowed to freely associate with whoever they choose even if we disagree with their opinions.
BS. We are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of several criteria. Government agencies certainly cannot refuse service on arbitrary criteria, and minority groups throughout history have had to resort to the law due to the fact that oppressive majorities might be unfairly boycotting them.
There is no such thing as a "free society"; there are societies with different values and with different criteria as to who are fairly and unfairly victimized.
For the record, in most civilized countries at-will employment where you can be fired on the spot without compensation for no justification is considered to be a gross undermining of worker's rights.
Except employers are not free to hire and fire, even in weird societies where that's seen as a good idea. They're not allowed to discriminate against people with protected characteristics.
In this situation it's possible the employers are vulnerable to sexual discrimination lawsuit, because revenge porn websites target mostly women.
This guy wasn't posting these pictures annonymously, he was including personal and identifying information so that it would come up if you searched their name and even their facebook timeline. You should also look past the daughter in the story, what about the teacher who was fired on the spot when the photo was posted? Not only was she fired, but she would be unable to work in that field ever again. How could she possibly ignore what happened?
Ah, so his villainy is rendered less villainous by this fact? His villainy is somehow not his responsibility, because his impact was indirect?
Or do you mean to suggest that the wronged women, instead of pursuing the man who targeted them EXPRESSLY TO RUIN THEIR LIVES should instead undertake the relatively trivial task of changing the moral values of an entire nation?
There is no reason a boss can fire you because of your private life.
But none of that changes that Moore and his henchmen are the primary villains here. Behind bars is the only place for that kind of malice.
Someone seeing your naked photo should never, ever be an acceptable reason for firing someone, no matter where you work. The original article discusses on how to prevent the naked photos from being spread; but we also need to fix this issue as well.
Courts exist, among other things, to solve such relatively petty disputes as whether you were ripped off over a £50 TV, or whether people moved a fence an inch. The magnitude of harm here is clearly greater; I've yet to hear of someone otherwise stable being driven to suicide over a TV.
It's not sufficient support for the idea that the courts shouldn't address something to say that someone had to do some legal manoeuvring because it's not specifically covered yet.
> However, they lost their job due to the prudish culture that I originally referred to, not directly by the actions of the villain.
Why should that make a difference? He clearly was aware of the harm he was contributing to, in a fairly major way, and continued with it anyway. There was a clear line of cause and effect from his actions to the harm, that he was aware of. That this line was social rather than physical in nature strike me as an arbitrary distinction. If I put a bounty out on you, the line of effect is social rather than physical in nature as well; I didn't pull the trigger, it's just that I was talking to a greedy person who valued money more than your life.
If you're willing to ruin someone's life like that, you do not deserve to live in a way where you're capable of doing so.
The courts have apparently interpreted it broadly enough to bar people from getting an injunction requiring the site to take down the offending content when they would otherwise have a basis for doing so. There's a whole bunch of entirely legal online extortion businesses built on this simple fact; the most prominent lawyer fighting these revenge porn sites - Marc Randazza, who advised her - is actually doing so on behalf of one of them and so has incentive to preserve Section 230 of the CDA.
They did lose their job directly due to the actions of the villains. It was an organized attack to ruin some innocent person's life. The prudish society provides them the means, but let's not forget that these people are pure evil. There's not the slightest excuse or reason for what they did, other than pure, unadulterated malice. The nudity makes it easy, but when that tool is taken away from them (it certainly should), there are still plenty of other ways they can discredit, slander or ruin someone.