UK Study Suggests Legal System Needs To Account For ‘Sexual Privacy’ In Copyright Cases

You all know the playbook when it comes to shady copyright shakedown outfits that work with or for pornography companies. Groups like Malibu Media and others built an infamous reputation for using the legal system to extract IP address-based information on customers whom they then claim downloaded porn illegally, they then mail settlement offers to those people, sometimes including hints at how embarrassing a trial would be for them, and then they collect settlement fees from those scared people, guilty or not. And if this all sounds like a form of extortion to you, well, welcome to the club.

This doesn’t only occur in America, of course. It’s prevalent elsewhere, too, including in the UK. But one recent study has concluded that the legal system does not account for the public’s “sexual privacy” when entertaining these sorts of legal disputes.

Changes need to be made to the UK legal system to protect people from exploitative litigation designed to prey on vulnerabilities, a new study warns. Reforms need to be made to protect adults from unfairness during copyright enforcement legal proceedings. This would also help to prevent children being exposed to adult pornography online.

The study by Professor Abhilash Nair and Professor James Griffin from the University of Exeter Law School, calls for a fundamental “reconceptualization” of the right to privacy. The study is published in the journal Computer Law & Security Review.

Now, it’s important to note that this study does not in any way suggest that pornographers or their legal partners should be disallowed from enforcing their copyrights. Instead, this is all about the consideration and weight that the courts should afford the accused. Put another way, the status quo is such that copyright cases concerning pornography and other forms of content, such as music or video games, are essentially treated the exact same way. But those forms of content are obviously different, as are the sensibilities people have around them.

Nobody is going to be embarrassed to be accused of downloading the latest hit single as they will adult entertainment videos. And it’s precisely that difference that the study says has given rise to these pornography-specific copyright trolling efforts.

“A fundamental lack of appreciation of sexual privacy at a conceptual level in the context of consumption of legal pornography is one of the main reasons why exploitative practices like speculative invoicing models continue to exist.”

“The current position is no longer tenable. Privacy generally, and sexual privacy in particular, deserves more recognition and consideration in court during copyright enforcement actions for pornographic works on the internet to ensure that the administration of the copyright balance remains in the hands of the legislature and courts, rather than in the hands of the speculative invoicer.”

Is there really any neutral party out there that could possibly disagree with this? Sexuality is a protected status in so many ways in many countries, yet we give it no deference in copyright cases in the legal system.

That seems like a problem with an easy solution.