Civ. Code, § 52.8 · Part 2. PERSONAL RIGHTS
Civ. Code, § 52.8
Text — As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
(a) In a civil action seeking damages or equitable relief against any person or entity that distributes, benefits from, promotes, or induces another person to distribute unauthorized obscene materials, including through electronic distribution, a prevailing plaintiff shall be awarded attorney’s fees and costs.
(b) For purposes of this section:
(1) “Obscene material” means material, taken as a whole, that to the average person, applying contemporary statewide standards, appeals to the prurient interest, that, taken as a whole, depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and that, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
(2) “Unauthorized” means either of the following:
(A) The obscene material was coerced, made, or obtained by trickery or subterfuge, or stolen, made, obtained, or distributed without the knowledge or without or beyond the express permission, freely given, of the person in the photograph, or the person whose identifiable likeness appears in the photograph.
(B) The obscene material is of a person who was less than 18 years of age at the time the obscene material was created.
Notes and commentary — not statutory text
History
Added by Stats. 2022, Ch. 26, Sec. 1. (SB 1210) Effective January 1, 2023.
Source of truth
- Edition
- As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
- Official file
- https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV§ionNum=52.8.
- Text hash
- sha256 e752594d4c2d59a7792916dc3394fe088980df40d4dcccc80bcfc36d017d1dd3
- Composed by
- compose_ca.py 2026-10-22: the Legislative Counsel's CAML content files read by a tokenizer (caml_readers.reader_a); an independent xml.etree reading (caml_readers.reader_b) agrees on every section
Procedural information only. Not legal advice and not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. Confirm the current text with the official publisher before relying on it.