A Web site aimed at letting scorned lovers humiliate their exes online has landed in hot water with the world's biggest social network.
IsAnyoneUp.com posts pictures of user-submitted nude photos along with screenshots of their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or Tumblr profiles - showing their full names, and in some cases, personal details, as well as links to their profiles.
Known as a “revenge porn” site, IsAnyoneUp.com posts the user-submitted photos online without the consent of those in the pictures. Anyone can submit photos by just filling out a submission form and providing links to the person's social networking profiles.
As the site has been gaining publicity, Facebook's lawyers took action last week by issuing the site's founder, Hunter Moore, with a letter of demand to “cease and desist abuse of Facebook”.
According to reports, Moore is no stranger to lawsuits, but no complainants have been successful so far.
Not liable?
The content on the site is said to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
The Act protects Internet service providers, Web sites and blogs, which publish user-submitted information. In this way, as long as the content isn't child pornography or copyrighted, Moore supposedly cannot be held liable.
posted the letter from Facebook's lawyers to his site. In the letter, Facebook claims that Moore's site violates Facebook's terms of use:
“You have collected information from Facebook users and published it without their consent, and have also published Facebook screenshots of the same in violation of Facebook's Brand Usage Policy. We have also gathered evidence that you have used Facebook's Platform integrations to intimidate and harass Facebook users.
“Your actions are illegal and must be stopped immediately. Facebook demands that you immediately remove, delete and destroy any and all screenshots taken from www.facebook.com, and that you disable and remove any and all social plug-ins or other Facebook integrations from your site(s).
“Facebook has disabled your personal profile and hereby revokes your limited licence to access its site(s) or use any of its services, and demands that you cease and desist publication of any content from Facebook.com.
“Facebook takes the privacy and protection of its users' experience seriously and is committed to keeping Facebook a safe place for users to interact and share. Your actions undermine these goals, abuse Facebook users and systems, and will not be tolerated.”
The legal letter concludes: “If you ignore this letter, Facebook will take whatever measures it believes are necessary to enforce its rights, maintain the quality of its site, and protect its users.”
Facebook fury
New media lawyer, Paul Jacobson, says he thinks the site is infringing on the rights of those targeted in the posts.
“Many of the photos published on the site are not published by the people they depict, and are of a deeply personal and explicit nature.
“Where the site makes use of Facebook's infrastructure to infringe Facebook users' rights and have a negative reputational impact on Facebook, Facebook is entitled to take steps to prevent its infrastructure from being abused.”
Jacobson says it is also clear from the demand letter that Facebook can do “quite a bit” to deny access to its infrastructure, “but the challenge is having images taken from Facebook removed from the IsAnyoneUp.com” site.
“I suspect that if this site is having a real reputational impact on Facebook, then Facebook may well be able to sue the site owner and possibly have the site taken down,” says Jacobson.
“Then again, another site could pop up under a different domain, or this particular site could continue after removing all Facebook-related content. The Facebook demand letter doesn't, and can't, require unrelated content to be removed.”
Digital indecency
IsAnyoneUp.com isn't the only Web site that lets people get back at their exes, with other sites such as GFRevenge and ExGFpics, where explicit pictures of exes can be submitted for cash.
Jacobson says people whose photos end up being published on such sites could sue for privacy violations or report these rights infringements to the appropriate authorities.
“There is probably scope to persuade the site's host to take the photos down, but again, it's not difficult to republish the site somewhere else.
“One of the lessons to take from this issue is that taking and sharing intimate digital content is very risky. Boyfriends and girlfriends split up and once shared, those photos and videos can be very difficult to take back,” concludes Jacobson.
Moore was given 48 hours to comply with Facebook's demands, but as yet IsAnyoneUp.com has remained unchanged. According to Gawker.com, Moore said he responded to Facebook's lawyers by sending them a naked photo of himself.
He is quoted as saying: "I'm not a virgin to cease and desists - I get about a million a day. I think [Facebook] is under pressure from users to do something about me... I don't give a [expletive]. I'm never going to stop."
It remains to be seen what further action Facebook will take against Moore and the site.
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