The Lawyer Taking On Revenge Porn

Carrie Goldberg is one of the only lawyers in the country with a practice dedicated to protecting sexual privacy. The Manhattan attorney devotes her professional life to helping men and women whose privacy has been violated by an ex, or an attacker, or a stranger with a camera or coding skills. Over the last decade, 33 states and the District of Columbia have adopted nonconsensual-porn laws, but the practice persists online. Many of her clients are teen girls or young women, and in many cases law enforcement has been either uneducated in the problem, unhelpful overall, or outright scornful and disbelieving. Goldberg goes after the images online by filing notices of copyright infringement, issuing take-down notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. “Using copyright law to combat revenge porn is a bit like using tax law to go after Al Capone,” Margaret Talbot writes in the New Yorker, “copyright is one of the only restrictions that the Internet respects.”