In grim news today, a woman has found that the only way she can avoid having an ex publish photos of her all over the internet – without her consent – is to basically get her boobs copyrighted.
‘Hillary’, the woman in question (that’s a false name btw, made up to protect her identity), had been in a long-distance relationship. And owing to the restrictions of intimacy in an LDR, she, of course, did what a load of people do, and sent nude photos and videos of herself to her ex.
‘[My ex] continually asked [me] to send photos, and it was uncomfortable at first. But I figured, “You're in love so why not?” They were very intimate.
‘There were a lot of topless photos, a lot in bed, I guess simulating sexual acts.’
And the photos then ended up in the public domain. As revenge porn is illegal in only 17 of 51 states in the US, and none of those being the state she lives in, she had to get creative. So she looked into filing copyright claims on the images.
To do that she had to show her photos to the government, she told CNNMoney: ‘I thought, well no, this must be wrong: they're forcing me to disclose them further when that’s what I was trying to prevent.’
After making three applications to the Library of Congress for each of the photos on the revenge porn sites – which held a whopping 100 photos – to be put under copyright, the images were successfully copyrighted. The process was arduous, brimming with admin (and Hillary’s real name is listed in the Library of Congress), and only made easier because Hillary had taken the photos.
But while most of the photos have gone and cannot be Googled, stills from the videos, which can’t actually be copyrighted under US law, still exist. Plus, we imagine revenge porn happens to women with a lot less time on their hands than Hillary. How are they meant to go about retrieving their bodies from being wanked over by blokes who get specifically turned on by non-consensual nudity?
First Amendment (the right to free speech) laws in the US means that revenge porn is a long way from being toppled, and old men in power don’t quite seem to get how horribly this issue can affect women (and it is mostly women) for life.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.