Hunter Moore of IsAnyoneUp.com announces new revenge porn website

By Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian

Controversial internet provocateur announces creation of 'something that will question if you ever want to have kids'

Hunter Moore, a notorious internet provocateur who turned "revenge porn" into a phenomenon, has announced that he is returning to the genre, eight months after shutting down his controversial website, isanyoneup.com

Moore said the new site, much like the old one, would solicit nude pictures and post them online. Much of the material will, inevitably, be posted without the subject's consent. In a note on the new website, HunterMoore.tv, Moore wrote: "I am creating something that will question if you will ever want to have kids."

His opponents have questioned the legality of posting pornographic images without the subject's consent. However, while Moore has received takedown requests citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and was the subject of an FBI investigation into hacking claims, he has so far evaded any serious legal repercussions.

In the US, Moore enjoys some degree of legal protection. He can rely principally on the Communications Decency Act of 1996, specifically section 230, which states:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This means that in the US, website proprietors are not liable for content that is submitted to them by third parties. However, Moore is not free of the law.

"He's not operating in a legal vacuum where he's free from potential legal problems," said Mary-Rose Papandrea, associate professor at Boston College law school. "Section 230 doesn't protect the people who actually provide the content. So that means that anyone who provides a photo to Hunter Moore's website or any other website – Reddit, whatever it might be – section 230 offers them no protection whatsoever."

Such people could be held liable under torts such as intentional inflection of emotional distress and publication of private facts. They could also face copyright infringement suits if the picture was taken by someone other than the person submitting the photo.

Papandrea said: "There's also a possibility that section 230 will not protect people like Hunter Moore himself because there have been some courts increasingly willing to read an exception into Section 230 for ISPs [Internet Service Providers] or websites that have facilitated the posting of content that violates tort law or other law."

Papandrea pointed to a ninth-circuit suit against roommates.com as an example of how someone might try to get around section 230. The website allowed users to solicit roommates by answering questions about what they wanted in a roommate.

Roommates.com was sued by the Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley, which thought the questionnaire was discriminatory and therefore violated the Fair Housing Act. A court ruled that the site was not protected by section 230 immunity because users could discriminate based on the website's questionnaire format.

"It's not clear necessarily that Hunter Moore's [website] would fall within this roommates.com exception, but it could," said Papandrea.

One key issue regarding bringing Moore to court is that if someone whose image appeared on the site pursued a lawsuit, the person would be likely to receive media attention and have the photos in question resurrected.

There is also the issue of money – people who appear on the site tend to be young and as a result, are likely to lack the funds to hire a lawyer. The same, however, goes for the majority of those who submit to the site and are easier to prosecute, because they aren't protected by section 230.

One copyright lawyer is offering a solution to people who appear on the site. Marc Randazza told Betabeat that he would represent people who appeared on IsAnyoneUp for free, in an effort to take down Moore.

The hacking collective Anonymous has also launched an offense against Moore with #OpHuntHunter after Moore told a reporter that a mapped photo of a photo subject's address would also be on the site.

Moore later said that he had been "drunk and coked out" in the interview and that the site wouldn't have the address feature. Anonymous, however, has show no signs of scaling back its attack, which involves the public release of Moore's private information, including his own address.

The submission form for Moore's new site did have an open box for the provision of a photo subject's location, but the form has since been taken down. It also contained a proviso that was meant to protect against the submission of underage photos.

© Guardian News and Media 2012

[Photo: Woman looking shocked at a computer via Shutterstock]