Your inadvertent sex tape could be worth millions

Now that the Nigerian princes have given up on us, you’re probably receiving threatening emails from the people who hack your laptop camera. Don’t lie. Even if you expected it to be a scam, there was a small part of you that felt compelled to transfer the Bitcoin to the blackmailer to stop your squint eyed close up from going public.

While porn star was never an intended ambition for my future Wikipedia page, there’s a part of me that gets disappointed whenever these email threats never come to fruition. Recently the government made it even more difficult to become an inadvertent porn star and despite my flippantness, this is one of the most positive things to happen in law in recent memory.

Like electronics, the law is a complex set of smaller components that takes an extensive amount of knowledge to properly understand. To the layman, understanding how they work isn’t really important. I mean, when you turn your phone on, you don’t really know where all the ones and zeros are going but you know it’s working because you can see it.

Similarly in law, you probably can’t recite section 4(3) of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act 70 of 2002. You probably didn’t even know that that was the full name of RICA. What you do know, however, is that every time you purchase a sim card, you need to provide your ID and proof of residence.

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That’s the effect of the law; the part that we feel. It’s the actual sauce of it that makes us taste the law. We don’t need to know how it works to feel that it’s working. More often than not, the frustrations that come with the law make us feel that it’s working but working in ways that may upset us – whenever you get a fine because your tyres are too smooth or paying an unavoidable tax. Whenever we’re reminded of the law, it tends to be in a manner that doesn’t induce happiness.

So, it is welcome news that South Africa has finally successfully had a civil revenge porn case run through its courts. R3.5 million for sharing explicit videos on Facebook! Yes! It’s fantastic. That’s the kind of thing that makes us look at the law and think, ‘Oh wow, that’s actually pretty good’. Because it is good. It makes us feel safer knowing that people who do underhanded things to hurt us can be held accountable and that the law accommodates that accountability.

When we see the law operating like this, even if it’s among getting fined for speeding, we can look at it and realise that the law is not all bad and sometimes, it does good things. Yes, it took forever to get this law over the line and even longer to bring a successful civil case under it but it’s happened and now there’s more protection to victims of revenge porn than simply handing them a book titled ‘Don’t film yourself having sex’.

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It may seem like a small victory and it might not even be applicable to you because you wouldn’t know how to angle your camera. It’s still important because the laws that really matter are the ones that are made of small victories and protect people from exploitation. In the present case, the lady didn’t know she was filmed while she was with her already married fiancé. That could just as easily be any one of us.

So please, Nigerian princes. I won’t send you any Bitcoin but I’ll be waiting for my videos to be posted. I’ll start preparing the summons with a smile on my face knowing that, in this case, the law has developed to do what it should – protect good people.