Goatse Can Get Jailtime in the US
Awesome Andrew pointed us to the fact that posting images on other people’s site to deceive them or otherwise put pornography on their website can get you jailtime in the US. The law is pretty specific and includes up to 10 years in jail for deceit and up to 20 for pornography.
As Awesome Andrew suggested this is pretty timely due to the deep linking image theft conversation. This is the first law of it’s kind that I’m aware of, and could have fairly wide reaching ramifications. The interesting part is that it doesn’t specifically prohibit linking to other people’s websites. So while it protects the people who steal content from having bad things happen to them, it doesn’t protect the people who’s content/bandwidth are being stolen. Interesting anyway.
April 8th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Hmm, I’ve had friends how have done this against bandwidth thieves… Using porn for this kind of stuff can usually get you in trouble with your hosting company or ISP as well, but this is the first I’ve heard of a law against it. I wonder how it would be applied to some one who replaced an image with a 1 pixel gif or use mod_rewrite to substitute images based on the referrer.
Would it be applied in the same way between a 1 pixel gif vs goatse? I kinda doubt it. If nothing else there wouldn’t be much shock from seeing nothing to seeing the inside of someone’s backside.
April 9th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
And yet again, the mindless whiners of the world win again. <whine>hey, I was using this guy’s image so I can promote my site and make more money and he changed it on me without telling me first!</whine>
I do like Tadaka’s solution however. Replacing the 80-120k image with a 1 pixel image would help solve the problem of bandwidth theft, but this would not cure the problem of content theft.
Maybe the solution here is the law itself. Having a disclaimer on your site that states that you own your images and everything on the site, and can change it with whatever content at any time. And you are not responsible for any damages your change of content may have on someone else’s site. Maybe someone from the EFF could write such a disclaimer that could hold it’s own legal weight.
The thief’s only defense would be ignorance, and from what I remember, that’s not a suitable defense in any case.
April 9th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
So, I wonder what would happen if someone created a *.jpg file with php code in it and updated the .htaccess file to handle jpgs like php:
That then pointed the browser to another website hosting the image?
Who is really hosting the image?
April 10th, 2007 at 5:49 am
I’m looking at the Senate site, and it looks to me like this was passed in the House, placed on the Senate calendar in July of last year, and has not had any action since.
Which means it’s not law.
April 10th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Thank you, syberghost - that was incredibly useful information. So time to write our congressmen, I guess.
April 12th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I’m no lawyer, but my reading of that was different. As I understood it, firstly it only applies to material harmful to minors and obscenity (small comfort, but there’s that). Secondly, and it could be dicey here, but the deep-linkee (the one having their bandwidth leeched) could claim that they didn’t do the “embedding,” because, in the end, it’s the deep-linker (the leech) who embedded the image into their page. Who’s to disallow you from re-naming or moving images on your own site?