Leaks and blackmail: reacting correctly at once

Two situations are often thrown into one pot, although they belong treated differently. First: material appears outside the agreed frame — that is a leak. Second: someone threatens to distribute material in your circle — that is blackmail and therefore a criminal offence. For both cases there is a procedure, and in both the first hours decide the prospects of success. One sentence applies to everything that now comes: securing comes before reacting. What has once been deleted or clicked away is later no longer available to you.

Case 1: material appears where it does not belong

Your contract lays down where publication may take place, in which period and in which territory. Everything that appears outside this frame is a leak — whether on a tube site, in a messenger group, on a mirror portal or as a file in a sharing network.

The first impulse is usually to close the window. Understandable, but expensive: if the page goes offline a week later or the post is moved, you lack any basis for the further steps. The first step is therefore not to report, but to document.

Document before you report anything

• The full URL, not only the domain — including all characters after the slash
• A screenshot of the page on which the address bar is readable, plus date and time in the picture
• Name of the uploader or channel, upload date, title and description text
• Where and how you found it, for example the search term that led to the hit
• A list of your own with every find and the date of every report

This list is more than bookkeeping. Leaked material is mirrored: a file appears in waves on ever new pages. Anyone who has documented the first finds recognises patterns, can refer platforms to earlier reports and in a dispute has something in their hand.

A report to the platform operator

Almost every larger platform has a reporting form for intimate shots distributed without consent and a second one for copyright infringements. Both paths are open, and they do not exclude each other.

One path runs via your personality right and the right to one’s own image — that one you can take yourself. The other via the exploitation rights, and that one belongs to the production. Which rights you give away at the shoot and which remain with you is broken down in the article on the model contract.

If there is no form, the abuse address from the legal notice or from the domain registration helps. Write factually: which content it is about, under which address it sits, why it may not stand there, by when you expect the removal. No long text, no outrage. Response times vary considerably, and some operators do not react at all.

A deletion request to the search engines

A search engine does not run the page on which the material sits. It can take the hit out of the index, though, and for intimate shots distributed without consent there are request paths of their own for that.

The material does not disappear from the net through that. It disappears from the search for your name — and that is the part that in everyday life actually hurts, because that is where neighbours, colleagues and family search.

File this request in parallel with the report to the operator, not afterwards. Both procedures run independently of each other and at completely different speeds.

Why the production is informed early

As the rights holder it regularly has the stronger claims. It holds the exploitation rights, has contracts with distribution partners and often a law firm that handles deletion requests routinely. A request from copyright and neighbouring rights is processed by many platforms faster than one from the personality right, because established procedures sit behind it.

That also applies if the report is uncomfortable for you. On productions we have booked we take on the correspondence with platforms and search engines. That costs you nothing, even if the shoot lies years back. A short email is enough.

If the leak comes from the production itself, because it exploits the material outside the agreed channels, that is a contract breach with claims of its own. Then too the rule is: document first, then confront. What anonymity technique can do in such cases and what it cannot is in the article Working anonymously.

Case 2: someone threatens publication

Typical are messages from a former partner, from a contact on the net or from someone who claims to possess material. The threat almost always reads the same: payment, otherwise it goes to family, employer or neighbourhood.

Four sentences, in this order: Do not pay. Delete nothing. Secure everything. File a report.

Do not reply on the substance, do not negotiate, send nothing afterwards and confirm nothing. Secure the full history instead of individual excerpts: profile names, user IDs, timestamps, payment demands, account details or wallet addresses, screenshots and, where possible, the data export of the service.

One point is particularly important, because it keeps many people from going to the police: blackmail is a criminal offence, independently of how the material arose. It plays no role whether you recorded and sent it yourself, whether it comes from a legal production or whether you would have decided differently afterwards. The question of self-blame does not arise here.

Why paying regularly makes the situation worse

A payment proves only one thing to the other side: that you pay. A second demand regularly follows, often with a shorter deadline. Nothing changes about the material; it remains in other hands, and you receive no proof of a deletion — anything can be promised, nothing evidenced.

On top of that comes the practical point: the payment paths demanded are usually chosen so that the money cannot be taken back. Anyone who pays loses the amount and keeps the problem.

If payment has already been made, that is no reason to leave it at that. Secure the payment proofs and file a report anyway. Proofs of payment paths are a trail, and for the investigation they are often more useful than the chat history.

The uncomfortable but most effective step

A threat only works as long as the threatened publication can destroy something. Anyone who tells the people who matter themselves takes the basis out of the threat. One sentence to the right person can achieve more than any payment — and the conversation takes place on your terms instead of on those of a blackmailer.

That is uncomfortable, and the decision sits with you alone. But it is the only step on this list that ends the blackmailability lastingly.

Note: This article provides a general overview and is not a substitute for legal advice in an individual case.