A bill that targets revenge porn websites has cleared a Florida House of Representatives subcommittee and appears well on its way to becoming a law.
The bill, known as HR 787, would “prohibit knowing use of [content] that depicts nudity and contains any of depicted individual’s personal identification information, without first obtaining depicted person’s written consent.”
That means that, in Florida at least, sites like Hunter Moore’s HunterMoore.tv and the drastically skeezier IsAnybodyDown would be rendered largely unusable. The two sites make their business by hosting nude photos of third-parties without the subject’s consent.
In addition, the sites publish private information pertaining to the individuals in the photos: email addresses, cell phone numbers, links to profiles on sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as residential addresses.
The bill would target any offender who lives or hosts a website in Florida but also, its language states, any perpetrators who reside out of state but post pictures and information of individuals who live within the the Sunshine State.
If the law is passed, violators would be subject to a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison, five years probation, and a $5,000 fine.
Revenge porn has spent a good amount of time under the national spotlight of late.Moore’s has transferred his attention from his infamous IsAnyoneUp site to the “very scary but yet fun” HunterMoore.tv, a site that even Moore attests “will question if you will ever want to have kids,” and IsAnybodyDown, which will host your pictures until you pay a purported third-party $250 to take them down, has been repeatedly accused of extorting its victims.
Revenge porn sites currently claim protection under the Communications Decency Act, which protects site owners from legal action based on what their users submit, and revenge pornographers are likely to raise that argument in their defense if they’re charged under the new law.
Bill author Tom Goodson (R-Titusville) hopes it will be effective by October.
Photo via IsAnybodyDown