German Court: Personal Rights Trump Some Ownership Rights

GERMANY—In a ruling that is being heralded in the States as a “revenge porn” cure, a German court in Koblenz, Germany, has sided decisively in favor of privacy rights in a case involving who has the ultimate say over the disposition of sexual or erotic images once a personal relationship has ended. In the case, a man who had taken erotic photos of a woman refused to delete them after they broke up, prompting the woman to seek legal help. The court said even though the man had no intention of publishing the photos or uploading them to the internet, he is nonetheless legally obliged to delete them. The ruling holds for any such case as long as the woman asks for the images to be deleted. The ruling also applies to nude or erotic images only, and not, according to The Local, to any in which the woman is clothed. The case appears to involve still images only, but we’re assuming it would also apply to filmed or videotaped content, and if the woman were clothed but, say, giving the guy a blowjob, and also for same-sex couples. According to the Guardian, “The ruling by the Koblenz higher regional court has resonated throughout a digital world grappling with the balance between freedom of expression and privacy.” While the Huffington Post’s Carina Kolodny fantasizes about such a law coming here, and many states have indeed been at pains to craft “revenge porn” laws that are effective without infringing upon First Amendment rights, it‘s hard to imagine the Koblenz ruling passing constitutional muster in the United States. That point was all but made in the Guardian article by a German lawyer representing “revenge porn” victims, who, addressing avenues of redress before the ruling, “said that while there were ways in which people who had had compromising images of themselves published online could seek their deletion, they could only do so after the damage had been done.” Now, with this ruling, any problems can be averted before they have a chance to become problems, or before someone even wants to make problems. It sounds simple enough, even if the seeds of something far more consequential can be perceived in the ruling.  “We can detect a wider trend here," Christian Solmecke, a German lawyer who has worked on a number of "revenge porn" cases, told the Guardian. “In the future we may increasingly find that images or data whose publication was lawful at the time may have to be deleted as circumstances change.”