Revenge porn site operator sentenced to 18 years in prison

This week, 28-year-old Pacific Beach resident Kevin Bollaert was sentenced for crimes related to the running of his revenge porn site ugotposted.com and his complementary picture-removal service at changemyreputation.com. While ugotposted.com hosted sexually explicit photos of women — usually uploaded by angry exes and accompanied by names, addresses, and links to social media profiles — changemyreputation.com allowed those women to pay a fee, usually around $350, to have the pictures removed.

Before the sentencing, Judge Benjamin "Benny" Hill took a moment to issue a clarifying statement regarding the case, which we are presenting here as a public service:

"First, let me say that it is crucial to our well-being as a society that California's hot babes feel comfortable sharing sexxxy digital images with their boyfriends, husbands, tinder hookups, friends with benefits, and what-have-yous. These precious hotties must never be made to feel that their generous, delightful actions may have unintended, unpleasant consequences.

"The threat of those photos later appearing online in a public forum is likely to create a 'chilling effect,' leading to the kind of ugly self-censorship that thrived during the communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era. For this reason, I am only too glad to put Mr. Bollaert out of business and behind bars.

"That being said, it's vitally important that the American public understand that Mr. Bollaert is not being jailed for allowing nude pics of women to be posted on his site against their will. If that were the case, we wouldn't still have revenge porn sites like [REDACTED]ex.com and anon[REDACTED].com up and running on the Internet. Nor is he being jailed for allowing the women in the pictures to be identified. I mean, everybody knows Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence, and it's not like we've gone after anyone involved in the leaks of their nude photos onto the web. So why would we bother with a bunch of non-celebrities? And he's not even being jailed for hosting photos that were obtained illegally, as opposed to simply mailed in by the images' legal owners. Reddit still links to all that Fappening material, don't they? All those nudes were pulled from an iCloud hack, and no one's saying boo except the celebrities themselves. Americans should understand that the exciting and repulsive form of First Amendment-protected free expression that is Internet revenge porn had nothing to do with his conviction.

"No, Mr. Bollaert is being sent to prison for violating the two of the great underlying rules of the Web. First, you let the user do his thing and stay out of the way. Both Hunter Moore (of the revenge porn website isanyoneup.com) and Bollaert got involved with uploaders to the point where they knew the pics they were getting were illegally obtained. Too close, brah. Second, and much more importantly: unless you're Amazon, Netflix, or Apple, you don't charge for your content. The Internet is all about sharing: thoughts, feelings, music, movies, textbooks, pictures, you name it. But most of all, porn. By charging these women to take their pictures down, he has shown himself to be a truly despicable human being who has set himself against everything the Internet stands for. Revenge porn may be free speech. But Mr. Bollaert forgot to keep it free."