Should they enact some severe legal penalties for posting video or pictures of people without their consent?

Ravi, of Plainsboro, and Wei, of Princeton, each could face up to five years in prison if convicted on the invasion of privacy charge.

@syz I’m sure there ARE consequences, but why don’t people seem to know it? That would have been a better way to phrase the question.

If they are posted with the intent of humiliating a person then yes. What happened to that person who commited suicide over it cannot be tolerated. I can’t believe how far people are willing to go to bully a person to that extreme.

We need some clarification of the laws of ownership of images not that there are venues of republication.

If someone posted a video of me doing something stupid in public, it would be on me. Public is public. But I have an assumption of privacy in my home, whether it’s a dorm room, a hotel room (temporary ownership) or a house that I own. Anyone who posts an image of me doing anything on my own property should be subject to penalty. I have a very vague recollection of paparazzi getting in trouble for posting photos of some celebrity/royal person on that person’s own land, from an angle that clearly indicated that the photographer was trespassing.

@perg Well said! I think maybe my point is that if you invade someone’s privacy like that you should be looking at the possibility of 20 years in jail. Maybe that would put the brakes on that nastiness.

@Dutchess_III I wonder whether the penalties are addressed under existing laws involving invasion of privacy, harassment/stalking or libel/slander (though the latter tends to be prosecuted civilly). If so, I guess you could strengthen those penalties, depending on what they are now. I don’t know enough about those laws to say, including whether you’d need a federal law in cases where the images were put on the Internet or any medium where they would be shared across state lines. Gonna be interesting to see how the Princeton case plays out.