News Digest

As U.S. FBI digs into nude photo hack, celebs pursue takedowns by copyright

Celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, and other stars who have not denied leaked nude photos of them are real are pursuing the removal of the photos from various sites on the Internet through copyright claims. As federal investigators work to determine who stole and posted nude photos of several female celebrities online, the images continue to be removed from various sites, indicating the threat of copyright infringement is having at least some success. Representatives for “Hunger Games” star and Oscar-winner Lawrence called the hack “a flagrant violation of privacy”, promising that the authorities “will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence”.

This is obviously an outrageous violation of our client Kate Upton’s privacy … We intend to pursue anyone disseminating or duplicating these illegally obtained images to the fullest extent possible.

Lawrence Shire, lawyer for Kate Upton

Lawrence, who won an Oscar for her role in “Silver Linings Playbook”, contacted authorities after the images began appearing Sunday. Copyright complaints apparently prompted the removal of images from the sharing site Imgur.com and rendered links on the social networking site Reddit inoperable in what experts call an online version of “whack-a-mole” that will never fully scrub the intimate photos of Lawrence and other stars from the Internet. Users reported difficulty finding working links to the images on other sites, although they remained active on sites that specialize in online piracy. As copyright in the modern digital age keeps needing to redefine itself, generally the bottom line is that the person who actually takes a photo is most likely the person who holds the copyright. In the instance of some of the leaked photos, they are not all selfies and, therefore, the female celebrities pictured in them may not technically own the copyright and that may create loopholes that keep the intimate photos from being erased from all sites.