| MrTrollkien |
10-10-2014 06:31 AM |
Can You Be Arrested - Or Sued - For Viewing Or Sharing Nude Celebrity Photos?
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In the United States, many states recognize celebrities? ?Right to Publicity? ? that is, their right to profit from their celebrity status. This means that celebrities can potentially sue any party who profits off illegally obtained images of their likeness, in an effort to recover any profit that party has earned. Parties who disseminate such images ? whether for profit or not ? may also be subjected to an injunction to stop dissemination, and to force the images to be deleted.
From a practical standpoint, however, while celebrities might seek to recover damages from those who profit off of their photos, it is difficult for them to target the non-profiting parties; such parties would not only need to be identified, but also sued for injunctive relief in numerous different courts all over the country ? an expensive and tedious process. As the costs to file and argue such cases can be considerable, and financial recovery may not be achieved ? either because no profits were earned so as to be recovered, or the prospect of collecting on a judgment may be remote ? people are unlikely to pursue such a course of action. And, of course, even if a celebrity were successful in obtaining an injunction against some parties, preventing others from distributing the photos could prove impossible. The bottom line is that once an image is leaked and spread on the Internet, it is likely ?out there? forever ? not just for technical reasons, but due to de facto limitations on legal recourse as well.
Complicating any lawsuit is also the fact that celebrities themselves would have to prove that they owned ? or had rights to ? the images in question. While such a requirement may sound strange to the layman ? shouldn?t it be obvious that the celebrities involved have rights to the images since the they are the ones pictured? ? under the law this is not a simple manner. United States copyright law normally gives copyright ownership of a photograph to its photographer, not to the subject in it. While obvious selfies would likely be found to be owned by the celebrities who took them, someone being sued about disseminating other pictures may claim that the celebrities portrayed in the images have no right to the pictures taken by others, and, therefore, no standing to sue; the burden would be on the celebrities to prove, among other things, that they obtained rights from the photographer, which also means being able to prove who took the picture. This may be complicated in situations in which a photo was taken during a previous relationship that has since ended, or, as often is the case, when the identity of the photographer cannot be proven.
Complicating matters even further is that once the leak of the photos became newsworthy (regardless of how exactly that is measured, it is likely that any such hurdle was overcome when it comes to this story), parties sharing the pictures ? even on for-profit sites ? can attempt to exert First Amendment rights; the media (which today, might include non-traditional media such as blogs) has the right to report the news. Celebrities may claim that there is no reason to share all of the photos in order to report the news, and such an argument may hold water, but what about if a news source were to provide only one or two example pictures? Considering how many news venues exist, all of the stolen pictures could potentially be shared in such fashion, with their sharers claiming First Amendment protections.
What is perhaps most fascinating is that under many areas of law the fact that those portrayed in the images are naked may be irrelevant. The issue is one of who owns the rights to the respective images, and whether privacy rights trump other competing rights. While it may seem strange to those of us not in the legal profession, in the eyes of some areas of law, the ?victims? of this crime are not the celebrities who have been humiliated, but the people who own the rights to the photos.
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