Law360, New York (March 9, 2015, 10:22 AM EDT) -- California boldly made an example out of a felonious website owner who operated a website dedicated to shaming, embarrassing and harassing complete strangers. Following the first-ever prosecution of the operator of a "revenge porn" website, Kevin Bollaert was convicted on 27 felony charges, including 21 counts of identity theft and six counts of extortion, all stemming from his role in the posting of intimate, compromising and explicit images of people, and then charging these same victims to take down the images. His conviction is a significant moral victory for online privacy proponents. The so-called "revenge porn" phenomenon, however, is a legal gray area in most states, and threatens to pit First Amendment free speech concerns against state invasion of privacy laws around the country. In one of the earliest cases involving the Communications Decency Act, a statute created, in part, to promote online free speech, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit interpreted Section 230 (e)(3) of the act to bar all state law claims sounding in tort[1]. The court noted that Congress did not want to "deter harmful speech through the separate route of imposing tort liability on companies that serve as intermediaries for other parties' potentially injurious messages."[2]...