"Involuntary porn" site tests the boundaries of legal extortion

11-13-2012 National:

Site posts leaked nude photos without consent, charges $250 to take them down.

In the era of Polaroid cameras, you didn't have to worry too much about a racy snapshot you took in the privacy of your bedroom becoming available to the general public. But thanks to the rise of digital cameras and the Internet, that's now a real risk. Hackers, disgruntled exes, and other vindictive individuals who gain access to your compromising digital snapshots can share them with the world with a single click.

Recently, a number of websites have sprung up to cash in on the public humiliation of others. One of the first such sites was IsAnyoneUp, which solicited nude pictures of ordinary Americans submitted by third parties. To maximize the humiliation, the photos were posted along with identifying details such as name and home town. The site's owner, Hunter Moore, reportedly raked in thousands of dollars a month in advertising revenue, and he made the rounds on television talk shows defending his site.

Moore finally shuttered the site earlier this year, but others have jumped in to fill the sordid niche he pioneered. One such site is the creatively named IsAnybodyDown. Like the original, it features naked pictures of ordinary Americans, generally submitted without the subjects' consent, as well as personal information such as their names, hometowns, phone numbers, and screenshots of their Facebook pages.

Sleazy, yes—but is it extortion?

If you think IsAnyoneUp couldn't be any sleazier, then IsAnybodyDown's seems determined to prove you wrong. A link on IsAnybodyDown reading "Get Me Off This Site!" leads to the website of "Takedown Hammer," an "independent third party team" that, for a modest fee of $250, will "issue a successful content removal request on your behalf." It brags of 90 successful removals from IsAnybodyDown.com.

It seems pretty obvious that "Takedown Hammer" isn't actually independent of IsAnybodyDown. Indeed, copyright and First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza has found circumstantial evidence that IsAnybodyDown and Takedown Hammer are, in fact, both owned by a man named Craig Brittain. ...continued... by Timothy B. Lee