Should We Follow Germany’s Lead When it Comes to Revenge Porn?

I saw this article on HuffPo, and aside from the fact that the photo at the top features the cutest girl in the entire world, the article got me thinking. A very, very high level synopsis is this: A guy in Germany had some erotic photos of his ex-girlfriend on his phone and she asked him to delete them but he didn’t want to, so she took him to court and the court ordered that he should have deleted the photos as soon as she asked him to. The main point is that the German court found that the girlfriend's personal rights trumped the ownership rights of the boyfriend.

To be clear, there were no indications that the man had any intention of posting the photos online, so this isn’t, strictly speaking, a case of revenge porn, but obviously there are related issues. (And the ruling only applies to nude or erotic photographs, not those showing the couple fully clothed.)

I’m really of two minds on this. On this blog I talk all the time about revenge porn, and I’m quite happy if this leads to women having better control of their own images, preventing them from getting out into the wild. Or, at the very least, beefing up punishments for cases where men do post these things online.

On the other hand, this kind of feels like overreach to me. If I had nude photos of an ex-girlfriend I would want to keep those mementos, even though I’d have no desire to ever put them online; they’d be for me, not for anyone else. Would the girl be uncomfortable that I had those photos? Perhaps, and I wouldn’t blame her, but she probably wouldn’t be totally happy that she’d fucked me in the first place, either, and those memories will live on despite the regrets.

And that’s maybe why I feel that this decision is a bit of an overreach: In the 21st century the line between human memory and photos (and videos) is getting kind of blurred; our smartphones are becoming an ingrained part of our memory. I’m definitely overstating the case by putting it like this, I realize it, but at the same time we’re in the middle of a technological sea change, so the fact is we don’t know how our memories and our technologies are going to evolve.

Imagine if the technology existed to wipe memories, and every girl who fucked me and regretted it demanded that I get my memories of the events wiped. They would love it, but I wouldn’t be so happy about it. This isn’t the same thing – again, I fully realize that deleting photos and deleting memories are not one and the same – but my mind keeps going there.

Of course, the technology to stream our memories onto the internet will probably exist before the technology to wipe them exists, so women are still in danger of revenge porn from numerous angles for the foreseeable future. So if a law along these lines does get passed in North America, I won’t be totally against it either. Maybe overreach is worth it, if it brings more protection?