Update: New Bill Says No (Mass. Court May Have Made Creeping Legal)
In one of the fastest responses to a public issue in the history of the Bay State, on March 6 Massachusetts legislators drafted and approved a new bill that would make taking upskirt photos illegal, and today on March 7, Gov. Deval Patrick signed it into law.
I have been covering the legislature in Massachusetts for more than a decade, admittedly mostly focused on how it affects technology businesses. Like many legislative bodies around the country, legislators in Massachusetts have often rushed poorly thought out bills through, with the inevitable result they get turned over on appeal by a court. That doesn’t seem to be the case with this new law.
According to the Boston Globe article, the new law has reasonable restrictions on the levels of privacy expectations:
Under the bill signed Friday, it will now be a misdemeanor to take secret photos and videos of “the sexual or other intimate parts of a person under or around the person’s clothing.” The law would apply to times when a “reasonable person” would believe those parts of their body would not be publicly visible.
That last aspect of the law, about clothed body parts “publicly visible” means that someone considered the possibility a more open version of the bill would have eliminated things like bikini photos, or, as I mentioned below, the recent wave of BooBies waitress cosplayers. Kudos to the Massachusetts lawmakers for making a well-reasoned bill and doing it so quickly. The original article is below.
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The top court in the state of Massachusetts (home state of the palatial offices of Nerd Caliber) handed down a decision in a case from a 2010 arrest that said that taking upskirt photos was not illegal in the Bay State.
Called the Supreme Judicial Court (I suppose to make it clear it’s not the Supreme Tennis Court), the panel of judges dismissed charges against one Michael Robertson, who had been busted by the subway cops in August 2010 for taking shots with his cellphone up women’s skirts and dresses. According to the Associated Press as reported in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the MBTA cops set up a sting to catch him after multiple reports that he was taking the pics.
To be fair to the SJC, it said that upskirt shots should be illegal, but they were not as the law is currently written, because the subjects were not “partially nude.”
Does that mean we will see a flood of creepers heading in to Massachusetts to hit conventions, knowing that the worst that can happen is they get thrown out if caught taking upskirt shots? Would the “partially nude” aspect apply if the cosplayer is wearing a revealing costume, like Felicia from Darkstalkers or, more recently. the Boobies waitresses from Space Dandy?
You can read the entire, ridiculously long brief Robertson’s attorney filed with the SJC asking for dismissal at UniversalHub.com. In its Conclusion, the brief makes it clear the problem is that the law as the Commonwealth (yeah, we aren’t technically a state here, we are a commonwealth) reads it is too broad and vague. It sums up, “Accordingly, this court should narrowly construe [general law] 105 to cover only easily identifiable and constitutionally proscribable conduct — namely viewing people who are in a state of undress in a private place.” Or, Peeping Tom’s are out, upskirts not so much. And the court agreed, dismissing the case.
Do you think this will have any impact on the cosplay or convention scene? Or is this just a single case that won’t change creepers’ behavior for better or worse?
