Ants Law or Forget Clause. This is how many media outlets referred in 2015 to the inclusion in the Penal Code of the crime that punishes with prison sentences the dissemination of intimate images on social networks without the permission of their protagonists. It happened, in 2012, to Olvido Hormigos, a socialist councilor from the Toledo town of Los Yébenes (with a sexual video of him), and the case was archived because before this reform it was understood that for there to be a crime the recording had to be than having been obtained illicitly. The woman had passed those images to her ex-partner, and this man spread the video, as did many other people, including the person who was then the PP mayor of that town. The two, identified, left with ease.
That battle was lost, but the Hormigos law or clause did not fall on deaf ears. Almost a decade after this necessary reform of the Penal Code, the Oviedo Court has yet to set a date for a trial, which when held will mark a before and after in this country with this criminal practice that is so common and at the same time unconscious, as It is to redisseminate intimate images or videos of people on social networks or messaging channels, who are often not even known. It has been repeated ad nauseam that this is a crime and that the Penal Code (since the reform of article 197, in 2015) punishes this behavior with prison sentences.
A warning, given other very recent cases, that does not seem to reach many Internet users and even less so to digital natives. So this Oviedo trial – days ago, the hearing was suspended due to the non-appearance of several defendants – should be a wake-up call. Proof that these behaviors are brought to trial and that the dissemination of these intimate images is pursued by criminal means. 30 people will sit in the dock – something unprecedented in Spain – accused of a crime against privacy. They face sentences of up to three years in prison.
The protagonists, or, to be more specific, the victims of this story are a couple recorded unknowingly having intimate relations in an open space during the patron saint festivities of San Timoteo. Some images captured in 2010, but those people did not find out about their existence until 2015, when someone found them on pornography portals, recognized their protagonists and… the topic exploded. They began to spread through WhatsApp accounts of people close to the couple.
Thus began a true ordeal for that couple (today they are no longer together), whose lives were turned upside down when they saw how that intimate relationship was visible to everyone. And the most painful thing is that the majority of those thirty people who shared that video with their contacts were, in the case of the girl, neighbors of their own town.
The only consolation, to say the least, for this couple is that in their case and thanks to the intervention of the Garante Data office, specialized in data protection, “the right to be forgotten was achieved – with the deletion of those images on the internet – which It protects all Internet users,” reveals Clara Solano, the boy’s lawyer. It is a relief, yes, but that couple will never be sure, this lawyer acknowledges, if these images are still in some corner of that virtual world and one day they can be disseminated again. That fear will never go away.
We must keep in mind, reflects Ferran Lalueza, professor and researcher of communication and social media at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), that “the Internet does not forget and also has an enviable memory.” Although the right to be forgotten responds to a pressing need and its regulation was a great advance in its day, “the effectiveness of its application – adds this Communication professor – is still very insufficient for various reasons.”
The first, Lalueza continues, is “the ease with which digital content can be replicated and disseminated.” The second “is the feeling of apparent impunity that is often associated with the anonymity tolerated by social networks.” And the third “is that we are not always aware that forwarding or republishing undesirable content makes us accomplices of the madmen who create it or put it into circulation.”
These accomplices, 30 in this case, are the ones who are now awaiting trial in the Oviedo Court. That hearing was to have been held last week, but had to be suspended when half a dozen of the accused did not appear, without justifying the reason.
The prosecutor asks for one year in prison for each of them; the private prosecution, three years and compensation of 20,000 euros for each of the victims.
Clara Solano does not hide that this couple “was very lucky due to the good work of that office specializing in data protection, in achieving the deletion of the images.” Many other victims of identical crimes have not been so fortunate. As Ferran Lalueza emphasizes, “digital platforms do not do everything that would be necessary to limit the circulation of inappropriate content, and those that do do not always comply with the required agility.”
This trial would have to serve, at a minimum, to make those people who spread that video among their contacts aware of the damage caused by those clicks. Clara Solano claims that her client went through hell, an ordeal aggravated by memes and montages of that video. Another proof that cruelty on the networks seems to have no limits. That couple “led a normal life, and the dissemination of those images stopped everything,” this lawyer reiterates.
There are psychological consequences that the lawyers of the protagonists of this story are convinced they will be able to demonstrate during the trial. In the case of the woman, she abandoned her engineering studies when that video was also disseminated among her faculty colleagues. And they spent many days locked up at home because they felt so singled out.
This hearing does not seek to focus the trial against the person who recorded and gave the first click on the dissemination of the video. Sentences against these producers have already been handed down. But always with only one person convicted, the person who recorded the images and the one who first pressed the button to encourage their dissemination.
What has been attempted and achieved in this eternal judicial case filed in Asturias – there are the 30 people sitting in the dock for the dissemination of the same video and who had nothing to do with its recording – is a criminal accusation against all the Internet users (a cyber herd) who bounced those images among their contacts. Therein lies the particularity of this matter.
Getting here has not been easy. A very slow and ineffective investigation, added to the obstacles of the lawyers of these broadcasters, has eternalized the matter, which has been dragging on for eight years through the courts. The prosecutor maintains in his brief of provisional conclusions that this law or Olvido clause protects him to request that year of prison for the accused (25 men and 5 women), while the private prosecution raises that request to the highest level of the criminal type: three years in prison. The compensation of 20,000 euros would be very short given the hell this couple went through when an intimate and sexual encounter that would never have had to be seen in public became visible to everyone.
