Jeez, it took them long enough. Two months after hundreds of illegally procured celebrity nudes were posted online for all the world to see, Google is just now definitively removing links to the photos from their search engine.
The Guardian reports that Lawrence’s lawyers have officially claimed copyright infringement and cite the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as their legal precedent for having the photos removed. Well, they’re not wrong: Jennifer took them, after all, and while the DMCA is known for being a sloppy piece of legislature, this type of stolen image is exactly in its wheelhouse.
So far Google has only definitively removed two links that both appear to be on a European site called, what else, The Fappening. But in a statement earlier this month responding to celebrity lawyer Martin Singer (who, if you’ll remember, accused them of deliberately ignoring the problem), Google also said that “We’ve removed tens of thousands of pictures — within hours of the requests being made — and we have closed hundreds of accounts. The Internet is used for many good things. Stealing people’s private photos is not one of them.”
On the one hand, it’s a bit unsettling to be reminded of the immense power that Google has over the Internet and how easy it is for them to make something go away—especially when you consider that according to a spokesperson from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google isn’t necessarily required to be proactive in removing this content.
On the other hand, these are stolen photographs that violate a person’s privacy and should never have been been on the Internet in the first place. So yeah, by all means, wipe that shit away like you’re Chris Hardwick at the end of an @midnight episode. Now how about doing that for other victims of revenge porn and photo theft who don’t happen to be Oscar winning actresses with a large number of resources at their disposal, while you’re at it?
(via The Daily Dot)
- “It Is Not a Scandal, It Is A Sex Crime:” Jennifer Lawrence Breaks Silence on Nude Photo Theft
- Lawyer Representing Hacked Celebrities Compares Google To The NFL In Righteously Angry Letter
- Stolen Nude Photos Got Reddit Enough Money to Power Its Servers for a Month
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