Shouldn't the people who posted the photos be really paying the price? My guess is that the guy's lawyers might have invoked the strong defense that they were j

Shouldn't the people who posted the photos be really paying the price? My guess is that the guy's lawyers might have invoked the strong defense that they were just the hosting company, they didn't created or owned the material and that they just wanted to allow their users to express with freedom. I guess the core mistake he made was not allowing "Flag this" button on his website because obviously he wanted to monetize this and that would have made his defense very weak because it simply means he was running a public exhortation service company. When you do think about legally risky startup ideas, one way to figure out the "badness" is to use the old world analogy: Let's say you ran a company in 1960 that accepts nude photos of your ex by postal mail and makes call to your ex that if they don't pay $300 then the photos would be in newspaper. Would you be punished for running such company? Of course, you will. However 18 yrs is insane. Looking at his income of $30,000 looks like he probably managed to get money from 100 victims. Considering 1 week of pain to get it removed, this still would come out to ~2 years in prison. To compare, people doing Enron billion dollar frauds got less than that.