Porn site can't publish secretly filmed porn without victims' permission, Dutch court rules

The porn website Vagina.nl cannot publish nude footage without the permission of the people who appear on the screen. The court in Amsterdam made this ruling on Wednesday in a case filed two years ago by the Stop Online Shaming Foundation (SOS) and HelpWanted, part of the Online Child Abuse Center.

The Dutch website contains professional porn and amateur porn, which includes footage filmed covertly showing people fully or partially naked in places where they believe they are unwatched, like changing rooms and fitting rooms. It also includes amateur footage of people performing sexual acts in private. The site contained videos with titles like, translated from Dutch: "Blonde in H&M," "Hot blonde - hidden shower," "Spying in the dressing room," and "Secretly filming ex-girlfriend in the shower."

The amateur content is user generated, and the website's management claimed it did not know about its production. The site said it played only a passive role by hosting the content. But according to the court, the site's management screens a significant portion of video submissions to monitor for illegal content. It, therefore, plays an active role in content presented to the public.

The court also considered videos where nude or partially nude people are filmed on a beach without their consent. "In fact, publication of images on a website such as Vagina.nl means, for the person involved, that they are turned into a sex object. It can be assumed that this is harmful to a person's reputation and, incidentally, also harmful to them personally."

The website operator must remove the amateur porn videos within eight weeks unless the people in the videos give permission for the videos to be published. Only clearly professional footage is excluded from this ban. If the footage is not removed by the deadline, Vagina.nl faces a fine of 10,000 euros for each video in violation of the court's order, and an additional 500 euros for each day that the relevant video has not been removed, up to a maximum of 30,000 euros. The website's operator also has to pay over 3,200 in legal fees, which can grow with each video takedown notice in which the site fails to comply with the court order.

SOS and HelpWanted called the ruling "a victory for the rights of victims whose nude images were published against their will." According to the organizations, this ruling could have consequences for all websites that commercially exploit sexual images.

"Now that it has been established that non-professional nude footage may only be published with permission from those who appear in it, most porn websites are immediately in violation," said Willem van Lynden, board member of Stop Online Shaming. "We will therefore not hesitate to address the large, worldwide, porn websites for their unlawful actions and demand that they adjust their working methods."

Stop Online Shaming was founded to tackle online shaming through legal proceedings. HelpWanted.nl is an advice line for young people confronted with online sexual abuse.

Lawyer Otto Volgenant called the verdict a milestone. "It is very difficult for an individual victim to get unlawful images offline, and often victims do not even know that they have been secretly posted on the internet. The importance of the verdict in these collective proceedings is that justice is done to these victims for the first time. Globally, this has never happened before."