Attorney General Kamala D. Harris Announces Arrest of Revenge Porn Website Operator

[Xithras]

89. There's no gurantee that would work.

In many cases a person in a photo has no direct legal recourse against the website operator at all.

Simply put, it's perfectly legal for me to profit off of your likeness, so long as I have authorization from the copyright holder to do so. You, as the subject of the photo, can sue the copyright holder for compensation because they authorized your image to be used in a for-profit manner. I, as the publisher, cannot be sued by you, because I have published perfectly legal material with the authorization of its owner (well, you can sue, but you'll almost certainly lose).

If you were the subject of the photo and wanted it pulled offline, I would propose a two-step process

1) Sue your ex for harassment, lost compensation (even if he gave it away, a jury might grant a cash award if the photos provided commercial value...and your EX would have to pay), and ownership of the images.

2) Once you have ownership of the images, you will have the legal authority to issue takedown notices to any sites that host them. Under the terms of the DMCA, if any sites fail to immediately remove your pictures, you can sue them for damages AND send notices to their service providers that will shut the sites down. I actually knew a photographer who had some of his work stolen (landscape shots, not nudes) and republished on a gallery site without his permission. After asking them to take the images down, and then sending a DMCA takedown notice, he was ignored repeatedly. So he identified the hosting provider that the site was using, sent the takedown notice to THEM, and the entire website was shut down less than 24 hours later. When they eventually brought it back online, his photos were no longer on the site. Even if the website operator doesn't want to remove the photos, the DMCA makes it an offense to knowingly provide services that facilitate copyright infringement. Somebody is providing hosting or internet connectivity to that website, and THEY will shut the site down if it is actively hosting infringing content (and if they don't, you can sue them for damages as well).

Of course, all of this goes out the window in the case of nude selfies. If that's the case, you don't have to sue anyone, because you already own the photo. The copyright belongs to the photographer, and if you take your own nude photo, you automatically own the copyright to that image. If someone posts one of your nude selfies to a "Revenge Porn" site, or if someone else uses it without your permission, you can not only order it taken down, but you can immediately sue them for using it without your permission.