So you'd be okay with a(n ex) partner posting intimate pictures and/or videos of you online for the whole world to see? Without you saying it's okay? Your face totally visible? Many wouldn't. It can be life-ruining.

I wouldn't send intimate pictures to anyone in the first place, because that goes against what I find moral. I respect others' choice to engage in these things, but the last thing we need is more laws that can get people locked up for posting pictures online, when there was already a perfectly usable law in place (copyright).

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.

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.

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?

Besides the points other people made, I would also like to add that the copyright of a photo belongs to the photographer, not the model. That's why there are laws protecting a model's rights and protecting people's privacy in addition to copyright.

It's a form of domestic violence and absolutely should be prevented by things other than the threat of being sued under intellectual property law.

So: I think it should be illegal, and carry a serious jail sentence.

But it's not violence.

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.

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

All (properly) criminal activities must have a victim, but they don't have to involve physical force.

Some examples:

+ theft

+ defamation

+ espionage

It's not "violence". Posting pictures isn't violence.

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".

> There's such a thing as "Psychological violence".

That's a dishonest redefining of a word. The motivation behind it is: people think violence is bad, we'll call this thing violence even though it isn't, so people think this thing is worse that they already think.

What redefinition? Just look at modern definitions of violence, for example that of the World Health Organization. That definition has been around for ages, and is rather uncontroversial, unlike you seem to suggest.

And even if you want to a total nitpicker, from an etymological standpoint there's nothing that suggests that violence only describes physical acts of violence.

>And even if you want to a total nitpicker, from an etymological standpoint there's nothing that suggests that violence only describes physical acts of violence.

Heck, even back to the very etymology of the word from latin it means both "vehement" (showing strong feeling; forceful, passionate, or intense) and exerting strong physical force.

>That's a dishonest redefining of a word.

It's neither dishonest nor redefinition.

Check a dictionary for "violence". You'll find several lemmas unrelated to force and beating. Also Google for "psychological violence", "emotional violence" etc. You'll find it's a common use.

>* The motivation behind it is: people think violence is bad, we'll call this thing violence even though it isn't, so people think this thing is worse that they already think.*

People have been using the word "violence" for non-physical for centuries, it's not some sudden "motivation" that causes this.

It makes sense to use the term for something like exposing an ex-girlfriend's/wife's naked photographs on the world.

I don't think many would find the practice acceptable in the first place, for there to be any need to classify it as "violence" to convince people it's bad.

Domestic abuse may be the correct word here.

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.

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/

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.

Every time someone says PC you can see what they really mean by search-and-replacing it with "treating people with respect". Such hyperventilation.

No, that's also a hate crime. Just because it's endemic in certain parts of the internet and homophobic areas doesn't make it acceptable.

So you're a respected member of this community, a highly intelligent and rational programmer dude with 16k karma.

And you want us to believe you sincerely think calling someone a fag constitutes a "hate crime", even though the term is nebulous enough to be meaningless?

This kind of implied personal insult is not the kind of thing we need on Hacker News, nor are unsubstantive inflammatory comments, so please stop.

Try doing it in Canada and see if you don't end up in jail.

Hate speech is a crime in many Western democracies outside the USA.

It's always nice to have one's karma-farming efforts noticed and appreciated. I'm saving up for my trip to Alaska.

As a programmer I've made my peace with the nebulousness of terms involving humans. People are made from language, and our core beliefs are abstract nouns.

It's a crime like speeding on the highway: only a tiny fraction of the incidents might ever make it to prosecution, but occasionally it gets people killed. So people should bear that in mind and choose not to do it.

>People are made from language, and our core beliefs are abstract nouns.

People are made of the cybernetics of language, environment, sensual stimuli, calculation, and reflexes. Our core beliefs are mostly evolved strategies and tools for navigating a world that has rapidly changed from that evolutionary environment.

With that said, how is a hate crime...a crime? It's ridiculous to expect a tribal OS to abandon its tribal software to such a level that it computes things either as a maximiizing solitary agent or an agent who considers all other agents as equal utlity, despite information suggesting otherwise.

That's honestly a ridiculous onus to put on people, especially those we would consider "the majority". The greater danger is giving government another vague blankish check to react to the demands of the idiocy of a society that doesn't look for things to think about but instead for things to feel about. Which is a fucking horrible basis to start trying to formulate laws and regulations.

I trust the mendacity of government (and most human hierarchies in general) far more than I trust the ability of civil servants to follow a spirit of the law as opposed to disavowing liability by adopting legalistic attitudes.

Well, abuse then.

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

You can't make these kinds of personal attacks here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html