I'm not quite sure where I stand on this idea of revenge porn. If we can punish Revenge Porn, can we punish what Quinn's boyfriend did?

Are you saying there's no difference between publishing simple factual stories and publishing an illicitly obtained private video showing people having sex without their consent to expose said video? Or are you saying somewhere out there exists video of Quinn getting piledrived?

The idea of airing dirty laundry for the sake of getting back at an Ex is where both of these meet.

No. It really isn't. One is seeking to share a side of the total story with others, the other is seeking deliberately to shame/humiliate/destroy the other party.

And as far as legality goes, privacy is something I view as significant in protecting.

Good.

But banning Revenge Porn in the UK was something that came from the very same demographics that Gawker panders to because it was another small step in the direction of censoring the Internet as the Government is want to do.

Not really. A lot of that 'ban' is just requiring consent to distribute from all involved parties. Technically that's the same in most of the western world (actual porn companies have to keep detailed proof of actors age, consent to film, consent to distribute, etc... even decades after releasing a scene. Watch the smallprint before a video and it even tells you where that information is publicly accessible). The 'ban' is also ineffectual as all fuck.

But I respect a drive for individual privacy, which admittedly should be more personally driven.

What do you mean by "more personally driven" ?

Are you suggesting it's a persons own responsibility to protect their own privacy from illegal actions like sky filming? Given the context here, that's what it sounds like.

Filming someone who is not a public figure without their permission is something I would view as a dangerous kind of harassment in this day and age. A form of doxxing.

Okay..... and? This has nothing to do with your initial premise that the Gawker and Quinn events have any similarity.

But then I'm separating public figures from normal people, how can I call that an absolute moral standard?

Well it's hypocritical sure, but at least you seem to realize that. Bizarrely you're now siding with Gawker's insistence that it had the right to publish Hulk's sex tape which goes against not only the law, a specific court ruling, and all reason. It goes against your own earlier statement that " privacy is something I view as significant in protecting".

is a publication worth treating with the legitimacy of film evidence if the results can often be very much the same?

What?

I have to ask, are you high or drunk right now?

A publication that tells a side of the story, provided it does not include untruths/cherrypicking designed to slander, is always something that can be shared. It might break trust if the other person felt it to be a private conversation but fundamentally it requires someone within the conversation, who was trusted to be included in the conversation, to speak. Anything derived from secret filming (including the film itself) is inherently an invasion of privacy because it was found by invading that privacy. It has no context, no understanding, and no level of given trust. The person did not freely express the content to the person who would spread it.

There's a lot of very gray morality here.

Everything is morally grey because you're making the mistake of thinking morality is as simple as right and wrong. I'll make it simple for you. From most to least moral in terms of privacy rights (so ignoring journalistic integrity and ethics), draw the lines between moral and immoral where you want:

Reporting on a public event > Reporting on an event you were involved in > Reporting on an event you discovered by accident/though someone who was directly involved > Reporting on an event you secretly spied on.

See how at each step down there's one more broken trust until at the bottom the only trust broken is the social trust that people don't spy on each other (unless you're the Government of a large Western nation of course).

I know this is a victory overall, but it doesn't leave me personally satisfied.

So why did you agree Gawker had the right to invade the lives of "public figures" ?