Does anyone know if there is some legal way to prevent them from posting pictures since the women aren't authorizing their participation? There doesn't appear to be any real way to contact the people in charge other than gmail addresses or one legitimate utexas address "(for general complaints of misogyny and racism)" The address appears to be for a professor at UTexas, Brian Leiter, who actually wrote a piece against the site: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/penn_law_stude...

According to him, the real people responsible for the XOXO site are Anthony Ciolli and Jarret Cohen.

There's more on Anthony Ciolli on his blogger profile: http://www.blogger.com/profile/34736307, including an e-mail address: contact@autoadmit.com

As for the law, in the past AutoAdmit has claimed that the CDA exemption protects them from any liability, no matter how foul their content. It's strange that it's easier to get a copyrighted song taken down under the DMCA than to remove material that is posted in invasion of somebody's privacy.

A company called ReputationDefender has some SLS students in it and they deal with this kind of harassment all the time. It looks like the site has been having problems with their image hosting (a lot of "red x" images on their site), maybe it's possible to use that?

More concrete actions:

Google Pages complaint form: http://www.google.com/support/pages/bin/request.py

Find where the images are hosted (Imageshack and Flickr) and complain there as well.

One suggestion:

Don't search the girls by name on google because that affects the algorithm and will pull this site higher up on the search results. If people want to check out the XOXO comments, I would suggest linking to it through the t14 site.

I raise the question because recently at NYU there was a 3L Hotties contest. (I have no idea who started it or who voted, but I think it was a Yahoo group that later migrated over to Abovethelaw.com. It used pictures from the internal student photobook, which ended up on the net when David Lat picked it up and started his own version of the contest. See here.)

The NYU contest sounded like a similar thing--I don't believe the students themselves were a part of it. But it seemed less offensive to me, and I'm trying to figure out if that's just because there were also men (and no racist/sexist backtalk on a connected thread).

Would this contest be similarly less explosive if there were men on it as well?

perhaps... I don't know. Personally, I am more offended by the context and corresponding comments than the premise itself. I think there is a fine line between something done all in good fun - and something that becomes a bit perverse.

It is easy to cross the line when racist and sexist comments are attached to something, no? And it isn't just that - but as a simple matter of respect - the line is crossed (no matter the gender) when people ask to have their photos/information removed from the site - and the response of the site creators is to imply that it is some sort of honor to be included and that those who were "lucky enough" to be nominated should "stop pitying themselves" and "think of their classmates who were not nominated". Maybe I am offended by the arrogance of it all?

In the end, I do wonder what a male parallel to this thing would be - if it were through XOXO I think it could get just as ugly and disrespectful...

I think the issue is that women are being "nominated" without even knowing about it in some cases, and they don't WANT to be considered for the "Most Appealing" award. If it were a voluntary contest, which it sounds like this NYU Hotties contest is, then there wouldn't be an issue. This site is offensive because 1) women's pictures are being posted without their knowledge or permission; 2) women are being nominated and considered for a contest that they didn't enter and may find demeaning or offensive; 3) women's requests to be removed from the contest are ignored (in fact, the site explicitly states: "We will not be removing images until after the contest is finished. Before you fall into too much self-pity at your plight, please put yourselves in the shoes of your classmates who were not nominated," suggesting that the presumption is that the women nominated WON'T want to be featured but that they should be flattered at being ogled by strangers); and 4) there is no transparency about who nominated them and therefore no opportunity for redress. If men were nominated, I would still be against the contest on these grounds--no one should be put in the position of "winning" something that is anathema to their values.

I don't know anything about the XOXO contest so I don't want to comment on that but, just as a point of clarification, the NYU Hotties contest was organized by two anonymous NYU 3L students (as far as I know) and without the permission of any of the 3L's. The contest was only among 3L's and only 3L's were allowed to vote. Additionally, the pictures used were the pictures that are available only to members of the NYU community. Even as such, there was still some discussion at the time of whether it was sexist or not.

Why these contests bother me (and it's not that there aren't men on the XOXO one): it's that these are private persons. They didn't ask for this, and they are now living with the consequences of someone else's idea of a joke. I think I'm not as troubled with similar things (like Judicial Hotties) that other sites have run because judges, or even law school deans, are somewhat public figures who have elected to put themselves out there. Maybe this line of thinking breaks down if these pictures were available online (on flickr or facebook or whatever), but it still feels like they were nicked from a private source without permission.

What bothers me about this xoxo content is that it's clearly not a joke or done in good fun- it's done to exploit the women basically for men's sexual pleasure. The vulgar comments on this site just further exaggerate the true nature of the that. What's worse is that I am sure at least some of these posters are current law students at the T14 law schools-- the fact that they would disrespect their law school classmates in this way speaks to a deeper issue that goes beyond the website and an objectification of women in law school that runs beneath the radar.

Eralon is right. There's no question that some current Yalies are ranking their classmates, as in this discussion thread where the posters "atlas" and "handsomedan" (the name of the Yale mascot) profess firsthand knowledge of two classmates in the contest.

(By the way, I hate linking to that website, but the lawyer in me must present proof.)

In one of my lecture courses last term, I was seated next to a guy who never stops IM-ing. He was logged into one of those chat rooms full of students who are sitting in class together, passing virtual notes as the lecture proceeds. When one of our classmates raised her hand, someone in the chat room commented, "that fat bitch should just shut up, she needs to spend more time moving her ass and less time flapping her lips."

An unprovoked ad hominem attack on the sexual attractiveness of a classmate is despicable but predictable. Friends at other schools have told me variations on the same story. But I have yet to hear of any IM message in which the legal competence of a male student was summarily dismissed on the basis of his appearance. If that happens too, I would like to know, because law students should have more ethics than to treat anyone that way.

Like Eralon, however, I suspect that this is one of the gendered, lopsided problems that persist in legal education.

There actually are people who are upset about this pattern of abuse and trying to address the problem.

If you know anyone who's been harassed by XOXO, or if you yourself have been harassed, you can contact http://www.reputationdefender.com/.

They were mentioned previously in this thread and are taking concrete steps to help. I'm a law student and don't work for them or anything -- but I know they're effective.

The Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03...

A petition to stop this sort of stuff in the future:
http://www.reputationdefender.com/campaign_petition.php

The AutoAdmit guys are absolute scum. They entered me in their contest, and spent a good portion of last year posting all kinds of nasty comments about me. There are many women who they've attacked in similar ways.

I posted about the whole story here. I've put the same post up on Ms.JD, but I don't think it's been approved for publication yet.

My understanding is that individuals own their own likenesses and publishing a photo of somebody who is not celebrity or part of a news worthy event requires a model release. Even if the scum over at AutoAdmit take a photo of a student for one their contests, they do not have the rights to publish it.

It they use a photo taken by someone else, not only are they using the likeness of the student without authorization, they are distributing the copyrighted work of the photographer without authorization. A DMCA takedown notice would appear to be in order.

I'm not a lawyer or law student so I could be off on my understanding of likeness and copyright. I'd really like see someone knowledgeable on these topics comment.

... the more credible one from a First Amendment professor: http://balkin.blogspot.com/#1217808847480967150.

That site is not directly related to the specifics of your question, however, which seem to me to sound more in the "right of publicity" - of which I have only a passing knowledge (I'm a student, not a prof or a lawyer, yet). I can say, however, that the right of publicity is the right of a celebrity to ownership and control of his or her image and identity. This right is not one that is standardized in any detailed federal law - it differs from state to state; some states construe this right more broadly than others.

I imagine that any application of the principles surrounding that right should be applicable even if a person was not already a celebrity, though again differing in specifics depending on the state law of the jurisdiction in question. So if the Autoadmit owners are profiting from the use of the names or images of these women, they might be subject to lawsuits for damages or injunctive relief based on their unauthorized appropriation of the value of that person's image or identity.

The problems, of course, are in bringing the letter of the law and the theoretical possibilities into reality. First, how do you ascertain the value of each individual woman's image/name? Or even of the entire group of the "most appealing" victims, as distinct from the value the administrators of the site get from the other threads? More immediately, what is the likelihood that any of these women, who are law students, have the money and time to bring a law suit? Most of us are up to our eyeballs in debt already, to pay for school, right?

Anyway I hope that helped.