If you legalize blackmail, you may as well legalize killing a blackmailer under some kind of self-defense justification because I suspect a number of people are going to consider that to be their best option.
That’s what a VPN is for.
There was a case where a person obtained the rights to nude photos of a celebrity she took during a modeling shoot early in her career. He wanted to make money of of them and could do so by publishing them but he instead offered them to the celebrity - for money of course. Is that blackmail or offering the right of first refusal?
I like this variation on Stand Your Ground.
This is the best example so far. It’s basically catch and kill, but eliminating the middleman.
I also wish to acknowledge Joey P’s outline of the principle.
Now we have a debate.
Right of first refusal, but I don’t really think is a good example. In another thread on the subject, I made frequent use of the phrase “non-commercial” when discussing the Bezo photos. Because presumably at some point in time, the actress sold her rights to the photos. She made the decision to give up her right to any claim of these photos being her private property.
Now if someone hacked her cellphone and tried to peddle the photos -if she didn’t buy them they’d sell them elsewhere- I’d call that extortion. But it the first case she voluntarily gave up some of her legal rights. People do that in other situations…a bounty hunter can break into your house to capture you because you agreed to allow that in your bond contract.
It’s a great example because IIRC the guy was charged with blackmail.
Here’s the details to what Saint Cad is referring to. The celebrity was Cameron Diaz.
Back in 1992 when Diaz was nineteen, she posed for some topless photographs with a professional photographer, John Rutter. There was apparently nothing illegal about the photos (although there was later an issue over whether or not Diaz had signed the model release form).
Rutter ended up never using the photos and filing them away. Eleven years later he found the photos and by this time Diaz was a well-known actress. The nude photos of her now had commercial value and Rutter could have easily sold them to some magazine or website.
Rutter instead contacted Diaz and said she could buy back the photos (for $3,500,000). Diaz contacted the police and Rutter was arrested for criminal extortion (and he was subsequently convicted).
I’ll admit I find the criminal charges questionable. Diaz had knowingly posed nude for the photos. Rutter wasn’t denying he was looking to sell them for the highest price. It seems to me that he just reasonably thought Diaz might be willing to pay more to keep them out of sight than other people would be to publish them.
If Rutter couldn’t prove she had signed the release, which is sort of hovering on the edges of the story, then he may not have had legal possession of them. Was this a factor in the legal case? Does her fame enter into it? That is, I seem to recall cases where ordinary people were threatened with having such photos sent to their spouse or the strict grandmother with all the money, and I wonder if that would have had the same result (again, if the material were legally acquired).
This is an interesting debate, because if the blackmail material was acquired legally, and the only threat is to publish it either to individuals or to the general public, then it’s hard for me to see how this falls under the umbrella of extortion. The definitions of extortion that I have found online refer, among other things, to “threats” and they don’t say what kinds of threats, so perhaps that was left open on purpose. In which case it might be left open to the judgment of prosecutors and/or juries.
As for any ISP that threatened to expose my browsing history, I would in return threaten to tell the world that they have made this threat so they can watch their business fall catastrophically as everyone switches to other ISPs who don’t do that, and incidentally the use of VPNs and other means of protecting one’s privacy skyrocket.
I think when you sign up with an ISP, there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy involved. I don’t see an equivalent when you’re posing as a model for a professional photographer.
Intellectually speaking, there’s nothing that prevents an individual who (legally) obtains sensitive information about another person from releasing it or selling it to the highest bidder.
Just as there’s nothing illegal about a person asking me for money, unless he happens to mention he has a gun. It’s the* threat* that’s illegal.
There exists an threatened person.
There exists someone with a threatening weapon.
If robbery is legal, threatened person can weigh whether to pay or not.
If robbery is illegal, the person with the weapon shoots.
How are you helping the threatened person by taking away his option to buy the other person not shooting them.
That’s an obvious consequence. If blackmail isn’t illegal anymore, then ISP (and others) will obviously want to tap into this new source of legal income. Anybody with data about you that he isn’t obligated by law or contract to keep secret will legitimately want to monetize it. As the OP himself said, “why oughtn’t I be allowed to see how much your privacy is worth to you?” I suspect that buying “interesting” infos about people from various sources and then see how much their privacy is worth will become a flourishing business in no time. “Compromising information broker” or some such.
If it were to happen, everybody would need to be vastly more watchful wrt their privacy, and in particular refuse all the very common standard clauses that allow companies you’re in business with to share your data.
That’s an obvious consequence. If blackmail isn’t illegal anymore, then ISP (and others) will obviously want to tap into this new source of legal income. Anybody with data about you that he isn’t obligated by law or contract to keep secret will legitimately want to monetize it. As the OP himself said, “why oughtn’t I be allowed to see how much your privacy is worth to you?” I suspect that buying “interesting” infos about people from various sources and then see how much their privacy is worth will become a flourishing business in no time. “Compromising information broker” or some such.
If it were to happen, everybody would need to be vastly more watchful wrt their privacy, and in particular refuse all the very common standard clauses that allow companies you’re in business with to share your data.
The legal default is the photographer always retains the copyright unless he sells it or gives it away.
If she didn’t sign a release, that might have had an impact on how he could use the pictures, but it would not call into question his ownership.
Rutter was convicted of forgery, attempted grand theft, and perjury.
The attempted grand theft was the blackmail part and was because he he threatened that his other potential buyers would use it against her.
The forgery he admitted that the release form sig seemed forged but that he was not who forged it.
The perjury was because he claimed the sig was authentic in a civil case.
So this is skirting the line. Offering right of first refusal would simply not include threats of how it may be used against them. Excess of fair market value probably wouldn’t help the case either.
This is probably one of the those cases where if you need the money, you might as well consider it illegal because an edge case will be decided by the person with the high priced lawyers
Now if you took pictures of your cheating buddy In public with the mistress and offered him the rights to the pictures , you might get away with it, it you might not since they’d probably have no value to anyone else.
I’m not sure I see a clean line between an offer and a threat.
Wanna buy these embarrassing photos I have?
Why - what you gonna do with them if I don’t?
Well, I don’t know, but do you want your mother to see them?
Where does it become a threat?
How about I own an empty lot, and offer to sell it to the next door homeowners - and along the line mention that I have an offer from a pig farm. Is that blackmail, or just effective negotiation?
Depends, do you have more money for lawyers, or do they?
That’s what I get out of example cases anyhow
Are we talking past each other here, or are you suggesting one party with a loaded gun doesn’t present a level of coercion sufficient to render the option not to pay moot?
Hey, those sites were for research, I tell ya, research! And it’s spelled N-e-l-l-i-e. 