Beyond-Outdated Internet Laws Are Ruining Lives
We need a new weapon in the fight to stop trolls from spreading harmful footage
In 2015, Alison Parker, a journalist, and Adam Ward, a photographer, were murdered on air by a former employee of the TV station where they worked. The shooter recorded the killings with a camera worn on his chest and later uploaded the footage to Facebook. Now, more than three years after Parker’s death, her father, Andy Parker, is still engaged in a Sisyphean feat: trying to scrub the footage of his daughter’s death from the internet, where it regularly appears as part of conspiracy theories claiming that the deaths were staged. His weapon? Copyright laws.
After obtaining the rights to the TV station’s footage of the shooting — simply by asking station owner Gray Television for them — he now tries to force companies like Google to remove content showing the shooting by alerting the companies that users are stealing his digital property when they post the footage without his consent.
Parker is not alone in his strategy. Victims of revenge porn, doxxing, and conspiracy theories are frequently becoming de facto copyright experts, using a legal theory first codified in the 1700s to combat the very 21st-century problem of what to do when the worst moments of your life are spreading…
