By Colin Daileda From Mashable

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those nude photos of celebrities are likely to stay on the Internet forever.

Some of the celebrities whose naked images were stolen and spread across the web this past weekend, such as Jennifer Lawrence, are trying to scrub the Internet of their nude photos, but that is a task that Internet law experts say will prove impossible. No legal team has the resources to track down every photo on every website and formally request that the image be taken down. The process would probably never end.

And no website is obligated to take down photos even if a court orders it to do so, Eric Goldman, the director of Santa Clara University’s High Tech Law Institute, told Mashable.

Copyright law, however, provides an exception to that rule and may provide celebrities with their only means of removing some of the nude images.

If a celebrity can prove that she owns the copyright to these photos, then she can likely get them taken down, at least from the sites where they were initially posted, according to experts.

“You can always go after the poster, but it’s basically impossible to get the intermediary on the hook,” Susan Freiwald, a cyber law professor at the University of San Francisco, told Mashable.

The problem, of course, is figuring out who owns the copyright to what images.

Lawrence’s representatives have reportedly demanded that a porn website remove nude photos of the Oscar-winning actor, but the website has in turn demanded proof that Lawrence owns the images’ copyright.

It’s likely she retains the copyright to some, but not all, of the photos. Selfies are undoubtedly the digital property of celebrities themselves, but in the photos they clearly did not take, it’s likely that the photographer owns them.

A star’s representative might be able to reach out to those photographers and ask for help in taking the photos down, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the photographers would be willing to lend a hand. The representatives could also try to purchase the copyright from a photographer and thereby gain the legal right to get the photos removed.

That’s the only means of legal recourse for nearly all the celebrities victimized by the leak. For former Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney, however, that’s not the case.

Maroney was reportedly under the age of 18 when some of her nude images were taken, meaning those pictures constitute child pornography. Attorneys for the former Olympic gymnast have reportedly demanded that websites remove Maroney’s nude images, and those websites would have to either comply or face potentially severe legal trouble.

But no matter what legal methods attorneys for Lawrence, Maroney or other celebrities pursue, some of the images will remain on the Internet permanently.

United States law protects third-party websites from having to remove content unless someone can claim a copyright, meaning websites such as Reddit—on which the nude images were shared but did not originate—wouldn’t be legally obligated to take down photos of anyone except Maroney. And even Maroney’s images will be practically impossible to scrub from the web, because as soon as a photo appears on a website hosted outside of the U.S., the legal maze to get it taken down often becomes impossible to navigate.

“There’s almost no legally effective mechanism to remove copyrighted images from other countries,” Goldman said. “The lawyers will tell you what you can do, but in the end, there’s no perfect solution.”

IMAGES:

Jennifer Lawrence arrives at the 20th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on Jan. 18 in Los Angeles. IMAGE: JORDAN STRAUSS/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Olympic gymnasts Kyla Ross and McKayla Maroney ride in the 124th Rose Parade in Pasadena, California on Jan. 1, 2013. IMAGE: PATRICK T. FALLON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

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