Florida Today reports that the proposed bill would prohibit the "knowing use of a computer or other device to transmit or post any photograph or video of an individual which depicts nudity and contains specified information relating to the depicted individual without first obtaining the depicted person’s written consent."

This means that if an ex wanted to share naked pictures of you in Florida, he'd have to have a signed note from you saying he can do so before putting them on the web. If he didn't get that note and posted the pics anyway, he could get up to five years in prison.

“I’m not trying to address the nude picture issue,” Representative Tom Goodsen, who's working to get the bill on the floor, told Florida Today. “I’m trying to address that if you’re doing this to hurt a person, if you’re doing this for malice, that’s where you’re breaking the law."

A law like this could provide much-needed recourse for victims of revenge porn, many of whom have difficulty finding lawyers willing to take on their cases. However, the bill's language may be subject to change as it goes through the legislature, as it could be deemed too overly broad.

New Jersey and Florida aren't the only states where revenge porn is under siege. Several women in Texas have mounted a class-action suit against a Texas-based revenge porn site and its hosting company GoDaddy for publishing their photos without their consent.

“I think 99 percent of victims get told no [by lawyers] so they give up,” Hollie Toups, one of the members of the class action suit, told Betabeat back in January. “I apparently was born with a hardheaded trait that came in handy for once, and I refused to accept the fact that there was nothing that could be done.”

Mr. Brittain (Photo: CBS4-Denver)

Craig Brittain, the 28-year-old operator of the revenge porn website Is Anybody Down, may have obtained some of the site's photos by catfishing women on Craigslist. According to an investigation by CBS Denver. Mr. Brittain reportedly pretended to be a woman on Craigslist's W4W section where he solicited nude photos from unsuspecting women.

CBS Denver quotes a woman who communicated with someone named "Jess Davis" on Craigslist in August 2010. Ms. Davis sent compromising photos to the woman, and then requested some back, along with the woman's name, birthday and phone number. The woman sent the information back along with a handful of photos, and never heard from Ms. Davis again. Five days later, the photos showed up on Is Anybody Down.

CBS Denver hired a computer security expert named Dr. Nicholas Weaver from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley who determined that the email from Jess Davis was sent from the same IP address that Mr. Brittain was using at the time. "Thus the natural conclusion is that it is almost certain that Craig Brittain composed the 'Jess Davis' emails and therefore was actively soliciting for content… by tricking victims into providing compromising photographs for his site,” Dr. Weaver told CBS.

Furthermore, a reverse image source reportedly revealed that the photos used to represent "Jess Davis" were actually taken from the Is Anybody Down archives.

Revenge porn proprietors often say they are protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields website owners from being responsible for the content submitted to them by users. However, if Mr. Brittain was actively working to find content to put up on the site, he may no longer be protected by section 230, making it much easier to bring a federal case against him.

" If they find that site operators are contributing to the content then there’s some chink in the armor, or if they make promises they’ll take something off and don’t, it’s not covered [by section 230]," University of Maryland law professor and cyberstalking expert Danielle Citron told Betabeat. "If his conduct is contributing and creating conduct that’s criminal, that could be the chink in the armor of section 230."

In recent months, victims have filed lawsuits against revenge porn proprietors with increasing frequency. In addition to the class action suit filed by several victims in Texas against Texxxan.com, a criminal case was launched recently against the site. The Orange County Sherriff's Department is working alongside the FBI after three underage women came forward saying that they had found their explicit photos on Texxxan.com.

In the midst of CBS Denver’s investigation, Mr. Brittain left comments on Betabeat expressing his disstate over a photo of him that we used to illustrate a post. We reached out to Mr. Brittain via email, but he did not respond. He did, however, address the report on Twitter last night.

"CBS4 story is another Nicholas Weaver/Marco Randazza fabrication. No truth to it at all. These women are told to lie by their attorneys," Mr. Brittain tweeted.

Ms. Toups (Photo: Twitter)

John S. Morgan, the lawyer helping victims of revenge porn site Texxxan.com launch a class action suit against the site and its host GoDaddy.com, announced today that two more women have signed on to the claim. Unlike Hollie Toups, the 32-year-old Beaumont, Texas resident who came forward in order to encourage others to confront their struggles with revenge porn, these two victims are allegedly underage. New allegations of child pornography further muddle the already complex case--the most aggressive legal action taken against revenge porn thus far.

The release says that the women have filed an amended cause of action against Hunter Thomas Taylor, the 24-year-old proprietor of Texxxan.com, as well as his parents, whose Internet connection (and occasionally their credit card) was used to maintain the site. The claim also names Austin Ray Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan described as the site administrator.

Mr. Morgan said he has found at least two underage victims whose photos were uploaded to the site. The victims have signed onto the suit along with their parents. Mr. Morgan is working with the FBI to report the instances of underage pornography that he says he's encountered while building the case. "I'm a civil lawyer," he told Betabeat. "We enjoy the opportunity to work with law enforcement because this is such an important issue, but ultimately the FBI makes its own decision on how it handles criminal investigations. My indications are that the FBI is taking this very, very seriously and is going to do a very thorough and excellent job prosecuting people for underage photos."

The case will be pursued under state law instead of federal law, as the victims and proprietors are all located in Texas. Mr. Morgan argues that uploading and hosting photos on the site without subjects' permission is "invasion of privacy, unauthorized use of name or likeness and what we call negligence or gross negligence: that their actions were completely negligent because they didn't think about the ramifications."

Mr. Morgan also said he is going to continue to add defendants to the case. "I'm going to try to start listing the people who have uploaded the photos as defendants and start listing the subscribers once we attain that information," he said.

According to Mr. Morgan, Mr. Taylor lives with his parents in Orange, Texas, and was the anonymous "James Smith" who called in to the Anderson Live two week ago in a segment about revenge porn. Little other information is known about Mr. Taylor.

Ms. Toups, however, said that she knows Mr. Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan said was the Texxxan.com web administrator. "Austin used to date a friend of mine so that's how I met him," Ms. Toups told Betabeat. "He's been around me and that makes it a little bit more disturbing." Ms. Toups said she lives about a 15 minute drive from where both Mr. Ponthieu and Mr. Taylor reside in Orange, Texas. "The only thing that separates us is a body of water and a bridge," she added. "I talked to some of the other girls and you just assume it's some creep that lives far away."

Ms. Toups and the other women involved in the Texxxan.com suit have served as a lightning rod for the controversy, encouraging other women to discuss their struggles with revenge porn. Last week, two women in Colorado spoke out against Craig Brittain, the founder of the website Is Anybody Down.

"It's kind of like the beginning of a healing process because for so long of course they've been hiding and kind of controlling our lives from the shadows," Ms. Toups said. "To be able to know who it is, it's kind of like forcing them to be held accountable for their actions. I know people have said before that we made the choice to take the photos and to deal with it. Well, they made this choice, so now they have to deal with the consequences."

Below is the press release and the updated claim. We emailed an address for Texxxan.com and calls to a listing for a home number for Mr. Taylor were unanswered.

Texxxan.com Lawsuit - Press Release and Amended Complaint by Adam Steinbaugh

A very "old" photo of Mr. Brittain.

Here at Betabeat, we've done some extensive reporting on the scourge of "revenge porn" websites, places where scorned exes or angry friends can upload intimate photos of women--and sometimes men--without their consent. Victims of revenge porn have been sexually and violently harassed, lost jobs and friends and even had to change their names because their photos ended up on one of the numerous revenge porn hubs.

Now, many women are bravely fighting back in a class action lawsuit against one site and its hosting provider, GoDaddy. Hackers, lawyers and activists are working diligently to confront a complex legal issue. Still, revenge porn sites continue to operate largely unaffected, despite the fact that more and more victims are speaking out about what happened to them.

“I call it entertainment,” Craig Brittain, the proprietor of Is Anybody Down, told CBS News earlier this week. “We don’t want anyone shamed or hurt, we just want the pictures there for entertainment purposes and business. I would say our business goal is to become big and profitable.”

Mr. Brittain also allegedly runs a service, Takedown Hammer, which charges $250 to remove the photos. He claimed Takedown Hammer is helmed by a New York-based lawyer named David Blade III, but several news outlets (including ours) have attempted to track him down and determined that no such person exists. Recently Mr. Brittain admitted Takedown Hammer is run by one of his friends.

In the post that we wrote about victims coming out against Is Anybody Down, Mr. Brittain himself took to our comments section. He did not defend his actions or seek to shed some light on just why he's decided to make a living ruining other people's lives. Instead, he took issue with the photo we had used of him, which he said was very old.

We find it rich that Mr. Brittain would take issue with the photo, given that he makes money publishing photos of others without their consent, right next to contact information and screencaps of their Facebook profiles. Mr. Brittain has said in interviews that his site helps desensitize people to intimate photos so that having naked pictures on the web won't hinder getting hired. To get so miffed by a clothed picture of yourself that you're compelled to leave a comment about it seems particularly laughable in comparison.

So, we'll swap out the old photo for a new one--if you pay our "friend" $250.