Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Arizona Is Gonna Have to Pay the ACLU $202K in Legal Fees Over 'Revenge Porn' Law Suit

Posted By on Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 12:00 PM

The state has agreed to pay $202,000 in attorneys' fees and other legal costs to the American Civil Liberties Union for a lawsuit that ended up blocking Arizona's so-called "revenge porn" law. 

Last month, a federal judge ordered the state to permanently block enforcement of the law, passed by the state Legislature last year. The statute made it a felony for a person to "maliciously" post a nude image or video of an ex-lover on the Internet or other mediums.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which included Tucson's Antigone Books and Bookmans Entertainment Exchange, argued the law wasn't limited to revenge porn, and targeted all type of nude images, which violated the First Amendment.

"The law ended up being more about nudity than any kind of revenge porn, and the nudity issue basically put us at...any book that had a nude photo, we would need to know if that person had given consent to that nude photo," Trudy Mills, co-owner of Antigone, told the Tucson Weekly. "When you are selling art books or history books, we as book sellers can't know one way or the other whether that person gave permission. The law was simply too broad."

The judge's order in July approved a final settlement between Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Antigone, Bookmans, several photographers and other book and newspaper publishers.

The suit was filed in federal court back in September.


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