Probably you have heard about Nikki Catsouras, also known as "the girl of the Porsche". As the Wikipedia explains "Nikki Catsouras, a woman who died at the age of 18 as a result of a car crash after losing control of her father's Porsche 911 Carrera at high speed and colliding with a toll booth in Orange County, California. Photographs of Catsouras' badly damaged body were published on the Internet, leading her family to take legal action due to distress caused."
In my opinion the worst of this story is the origin of the photos; according to various court documents, two traffic officers in California, Thomas O'Donnell and Aaron Reich, took photos of the accident and sent them to friends.
Nikki Catsouras' family began a battle to make the photos disappear from the Internet and finally they decided to undertake legal actions against the agents and the traffic department. Surprinsingly, the judge decided that there was not basis for the case: Judge Steven L. Perk ruled that Reich and O'Donnell were not under any responsibility for protecting the privacy of the Catsouras family, effectively ending the basis for the case. The Judge accepted that, while the dispatchers' conduct was "utterly reprehensible", there was no law that allowed it to be punishable.
The problem is that once something is on the web (text, picture, video...) it is impossible to make is disappear; so only the possibility is to prevent its arrival to the web. So the decission taken by this Judge doesn't help at all to prevent this situations.
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