As the internet becomes further and further advanced, our laws are becoming less effective. There are some laws that have been set up to protect citizens from having their work stolen to protecting businesses from hurtful reviews. However, there is a new problem reaching the surface online, such as posting explicit photos of an ex-lover to publicly shame them. In investigating the problem of nationally criminalizing revenge, I have found that the law of defamation and copyright infringement are too broad to handle revenge porn cases, leading to researching if the bill introduced by Jackie Speier, congressional representative of San Francisco, California, known as the Intimate Privacy Protection Act (IPPA), can help reduce this problem.
The problem of fighting revenge porn starts with the fact that the United States of
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Jackie Speier, the congresswoman who is behind the bill, states that she wishes to propose the bill to help out those who do not have the fame and credibility to take on their exposers in court. When asked about why she proposed the bill, Speier responded, “Celebrities and other high profile victims might be able take on these predators in civil courts, but the average person can't afford that option.” When she mentioned this point to the problem with fighting revenge porn, it adds more importance one why we need to add in her law on a national level; so everyone’s protected, not just those with money. She then continues to say, “Even more disturbing is the number of victims who have mustered the courage and strength to pursue criminal charges, only to learn there is no law that protects them. My bill will fix that appalling legal failure.” This gives the victims insurance that they will not have to sue on a petty crime that does not focus strictly on revenge
However, others feel that it is an unwarranted intrusion into the rights to privacy of individuals who have already paid their debts to society. Megan Kanka should still be alive today, and, as a society, we have an undeniable responsibility to keep such tragedies from taking place in the future. We must not merely respond when sexual crimes occur but must, instead, take an active role in preventing them in the first place. Megan's Law is an effective attempt by legislators to help us achieve this goal. Indeed, it helps to prevent these crimes by protecting children, our most defenseless citizens, from those who are most likely to endanger them.
Ashcroft vs. ACLU, 00-1293, deals with a challenge to the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which Congress passed in 1998. The law, which is the subject of this essay, attempts to protect minors from exposure to Internet pornography by requiring that commercial adult websites containing "indecent" material that is "harmful to minors" use age-verification mechanisms such as credit cards or adult identification numbers.(Child)
27 Baird, Robert M. and Stuart E Rosenbaum. Pornography - Private Right or Public Menace Pg. 52
Imagine a place where you have access to anything and everything one could want. Some would say that is only existent in a utopia, and some would say that describes the Internet. Many adults go on to the net and access pornographic material that would be unsuitable for children. This is called cyberporn. The controversy lies in the fact that children are accessing these materials also. Government, activist groups, and concerned parents are fighting to regulate obscene material found over the Internet to protect children. The first amendment is the only thing protecting adults from losing their rights to obtain pornographic or indecent material on the net. Under the first amendment the government must not regulate cyberporn. Online sex has been around since the first bulletin boards were available over the computer in the early 1980's. People would pay to down load pornographic pictures and talk dirty to each other. Usenet groups took control of porn after the Internet came about. They did not charge people to down load picture and to interact with others. In result, Internet porn grew (Rosen 16). Things have changed drastically since then with over a million different sites available to access porn. Now it is not just for adults. Children are accessing the obscene materials. This brings rise to issues of how to protect them from problems that can arise. The materials they view, could influence children. They could also be subjected to cybersex in a chat room full of people that could be three times their age. Worst of all pedophilias could influence children to meet with them outside of the computer. The government and the United States citizens must now figure out how to protect our children from the effects of cyberporn, and y...
In today’s American society, almost everyone, even children as young as six, owns a cell phone with a camera. Although convenient, camera phones also open the door to massive problems concerning child pornography that stem from sexting, or sending nude or lascivious photos. According to a 2010 Federal Bureau of Investigation survey1 of 4,400 middle and high school students, “approximately eight percent of students reported that they had sent a sext of themselves to others while thirteen percent said they had received a sext.” The main problem with sexting, aside from being child pornography if it is a picture of minor, is the ease of dissemination of the sext to other contacts or even the Internet. The United States alone has seen several students commit suicide after a sext intended for one person’s eyes goes viral or is sent to the entire high school. Such was the case of Ohio high school student, Jesse Logan, who sent nude photos to her boyfriend who then sent them to other students who harassed her until she committed suicide.2
When deliberating over whether access to pornography should be prohibited, four areas of contention must be elaborated upon and evaluated critically to provide a sensible basis on which a judgement can be made. Firstly, it must be concluded whether pornography can be classed as a form of speech, and whether it enjoys the same protections as art and literature under the principle. Secondly, works such as those of Catherine MacKinnon can be drawn upon to offer a feminist perspective of the effects of pornography on the treatment of women within modern democratic society. Moreover, the principles of Devlin and Feinberg offer relevant acumen regarding the criminalisation of pornographic media. Overall, this essay will argue that whilst access to pornography should not be entirely prohibited; publications that depict ‘extreme’ situations should be subject to regulation and restriction.
Technology has provided our society with numerous innovations that have been created to improve the quality of life on a daily basis. One such innovation is the Internet. The access to a wide variety of information is perhaps the most valuable tool, as well as the most important tool, that we have entering the twenty-first century. There are virtually no limits on how much can be achieved through the use of the Internet. This is not, however, necessarily a good thing. Most people find that offensive material such as child pornography and hate-related propaganda can be viewed by people too easily via the Internet. While child pornography is a detestable subject, it does not have the sort of appeal that a hate group website does in that there are stricter guidelines preventing individuals from attaining child pornography material from the Internet. These stricter guidelines include the Communications Decency Act (1995), which forbids the use of the Internet for such purposes as attaining material of a child pornographic nature (Wolf, 2000). This law can also be used to monitor the hate group websites, but since the law is too broad, it is rarely held up in court. The hate group websites do, however, have a large enough following that there is legislation being formed to specifically target the material on the sites. Despite the highly offensive nature of hate group websites, the sites should not be censored because the right to free speech must be preserved. In this paper we will define what is considered to be hateful content; why this hateful content should be protected; what else can be done to monitor this material on the Internet; and when are the people cr...
Now, it may seem as though the problem at hand is the person being victimized by revenge pornography, yet this is an issue but, the real
Tears begin to fall down a child’s face. Her body goes into shock out of fear. Her mother warned her about watching inappropriate content, and there it was, right on her computer screen. This could not have happened though. All she was doing was casually browsing the internet before a pop-up appeared. Although it may seem hard to believe, the major cause of events such as this is the lack of censorship on the internet. Internet censorship relates to the removal of offensive, inappropriate, or controversial content published online. The current problem with the internet is that there are few restrictions on what can be published or viewed. Several sites on the internet only offer a warning about inappropriate content that can easily be bypassed by agreeing to the terms. Other websites provide access to private or military information. More dreadfully, however, are websites that use their explicit content as a promotion. These factors bring the conclusion that anybody of any given age can view and publish inappropriate or dangerous content. The current problems with the internet serve for clarification as to why the United States should create a nonpartisan assembly to censor the internet in order to protect its citizens from the mental, emotional, and physical harms the internet creates.
...he certainty of restitution, by requiring monetary payment, takes the profit out of crime (Carson).
McCarthy, M. (2005). THE CONTINUING SAGA OF INTERNET CENSORSHIP: THE CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION ACT. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, (2), 83-101.
As the Internet has become more widely recognized and used by people all over the world, it has brought a new medium in which information can very easily be broadcast to everyone with access to it. In 1995 there was a projected 26 million Internet users, which has grown to almost 300 million today. One major problem with this is that everyone represents different countries and provinces which have different outtakes on certain types of freedom of speech as well as different laws about it. This proposes a new type of law that would need to be written in order to determine whether or not something is illegal on the Internet. A person in one country can express what they want to, but that expression may be illegal in another country and in this situation whose laws are to be followed? What I propose to do accomplish in this paper is to discuss the freedom of speech laws of the United States of America and those of France, China, and Canada. I will examine what about them is similar and what about them is different. The bringing of the Internet has brought many new types of businesses as well as ways in order to communicate with the world, but as with each new endeavor or invention, there needs to be a way in order to govern its use and policies. There must also be ways in order to punish those not following the new laws and policies of use, since that the country that the person is in may allow what they did, but it may not be allowed on the Internet or in a different country. In other words, there is the need for international laws governing the Internet.
The 90's internet boom gave rise to new ways of writing in through access to cyberspace. What used to be printed or handwritten on physical surfaces such as paper, cardboard, or bulletin boards has changed to 0's and 1's, bits and bytes of digitized information that can be displayed thru the projections of computer screens. Moreover, the internet has made the process of publishing one's works, writing letters, or chatting with one another much easier and convenient for everyone around the globe. The internet became a universal tool, giving much freedom and flexibility to the users; it gave them opportunity to deliver their thoughts with little or no restrictions. Since it's impossible to regulate all cyber-activities, internet users are often unrestricted by the normal laws or authorities that would set boundaries around the various online transactions. More importantly, the fact that a net user can take on different identities in cyberspace brings about several ethical and social issues. These anonymous and unrestrictive characteristics of cyberspace often permite abusive users to easily involve themselves in serious cybercrimes such as cyberstalking, cyber-rape, and cyber-harassment through chatting services, emails, cyber communities, and other online communication.
...ens in Relationship to Sexting and Censorship.” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 45.2 (2012): 315–350. Print.
One of the unique challenges to regulating or settling on the appropriate way to regulate is that there is no concrete definition of pornography. While law enforcement bodies such as the police, prosecutors and judges, are accustomed to dealing with issues that are exclusive to the United States, the Internet is a worldwide community with servers and members coming from hundreds of countries. Defining "pornographic content" on a global level has not been easy because of different moral and legal variations. In the United States one type of act may be defined as being "hard-core porn", however, another country could see this act as much less offensive. So while the United States may try to regulate one level of pornography, a person could go find it on a website launched from another country. This is one the problems that is being acknowledged when trying to find a way of dealing with the pornography on the Internet.