Christopher Goffard reports:
Three weeks after his 18-year-old daughter sped away in his Porsche and swerved to her death in Lake Forest, Christos Catsouras understood why he had not been allowed to see her body.
Photographs of the Halloween 2006 crash, taken and leaked by the California Highway Patrol, were proliferating on the Internet. The crash had left his daughter unrecognizable.
Catsouras said he found 35 websites — and soon hundreds more — that showcased the macabre photographs, some with headlines that mocked his daughter. When he took them to the attention of CHP officials and pleaded for help, he said, they told him there was nothing they could do. “They said if we wanted to file a complaint, we could file a complaint.”
The result: a lawsuit that, even though it has yet to go to trial, has reshaped the boundaries of privacy law in the Internet age.
Read more in the L.A. Times.