Female takes naked pictures of herself in the bathroom mirror and texts them to boyfriend. Then they break up. He tells her that if he sees her at his work (he is a bartender at a bar) that he will submit the photos online. Well, she goes to the bar with friends one night. A few weeks later she begins to have guys contacting her on Facebook and learns that ex did put her photos on a website. She confronts him and he basically says he warned her and she had it coming. He further says he did it for paybacks and the pics will never go away.

Detective learns that this website is based out of state. Anyone can use an online submission form to submit picture(s), a name, email, social networking site. It is very clear the website is for sexually oriented images. And clear they don't care if you are submitting you own photos or someone else's photos. Ex submits the form on 11/7/11 and the webpage with our female's name and pics goes live on 11/28. Detective spoke to the webmaster on the phone and he supplied to IP address for the sender.

So, does it fit online impersonation? Did ex create the webpage, or did the webmaster create it?

Anyone think of any other offenses this could be?

It is not impersonation at all. There is no law against putting someones photos on the internet.

What is impersonation is if he were to make a webpage / profile saying "Hi. I am Jane Doe and these are my photos" or something like that. But simply posting the photos and saying "here is my ex-girlfriend, Jane Doe, and she lives at 123 Main St." is not illegal.

If the photos were being offered for a charge the girl could make a DMCA complaint / take down notice to the website as she is the copyright owner. But that only applies if the photos are offered for a commercial purpose or if he tries to sell them. But if they offered freely, then, no, the DMCA does not apply.

One does not need the permission of the subject in order to post a photograph of that subject online. Just think of [insert name of favorite Hollywood starlet here] and the naked pictures of her that have appeared all over the internet.

Once you give me / send me something, I can do whatever I want to with it. Consider this a teachable moment for the lady in question.

I have two question:

1)Does he intend to be her? It would be difficult if he just submitted a pic of her with her name on it identifying her. He would have to take on her persona as the one submitting the photo.

2)Does the site qualify as a message board program or a regular web-site?

He doesn't need to create a web-site because under (a)(2) he just needs to post. Also you would want to see what email address he used to send the pic to the site.

I have handled several of these if you want to contact me.

RT: So what did you decide to do??

bump - any updates or similar stories from anyone else?

I joined this forum after googling "Online Impersonation". I know of a case of an American web developer who has created a porn site using pictures taken around 2003 of a Ukrainian girl, creating a new name for her and then posting them on internet forums with links to his site to drive traffic for ad revenue.He has also misrepresented himself in the "Whois" registration (phone no., address) of the site.He lives outside Texas but the site servers are in Texas.Is he committing a criminal offence in your opinion?I don't know much about law but know if I was the girl concerned trying to put her past behind her I would feel criminally abused.

"Criminally abused"?? haha never heard of that one before.

But, no, it is not against the law. If the pictures are owned by her, then she can make a copyright / DMCA complaint to the server owner. But that is it.

It is not illegal to post someone's photos on the internet. It could be a civil tort (defamation, since he linked her to a porn site), but it is not illegal.

Since he is not using her name with the photos, how can she be crimnally harmed by this?

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Originally posted by Steve14:
"Criminally abused"?? haha never heard of that one before.

But, no, it is not against the law. If the pictures are owned by her, then she can make a copyright / DMCA complaint to the server owner. But that is it.

It is not illegal to post someone's photos on the internet. It could be a civil tort (defamation, since he linked her to a porn site), but it is not illegal.

Since he is not using her name with the photos, how can she be crimnally harmed by this?

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Many thanks for the reply Steve, shame there's not a lot can be done about it, I don't like to see people making profit from another persons' indiscretions and I guess she was just keeping her head down and hoping people would forget those pictures.Happy New Year to all.