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FAWS comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3 - Less Wrong
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Counterexample:
A man seduces a female movie star into a one night stand and secretly records a sex tape. He would prefer to blackmail the movie star for lots of money, but if that fails he would rather release the tape to the press for a smaller amount of money + prestige than he would just do nothing. The movie star's preference ordering is for nothing to happen, for her to pay out, then lastly for the press to find out. The optimal choice is for her to pay out, because if she pre-commits to not give in to blackmail, she will receive the worst possible outcome.
This seems to fall squarely under blackmail, yet requires no pre-committment, iteration, or bluffing.
That's not blackmail at all. It seems like blackmail because of the questionable morality of selling secretly recorded sex tapes, but giving the movie star the chance to buy the tape first doesn't make the whole thing any less moral than it would be without that chance, and unlike real blackmail the movie star being known not to respond to blackmail doesn't help in any way.
Consider this variation: Instead of a secret tape the movie star voluntarily participated in an amateur porno that was intended to be publicly released from the beginning, but held up for some reason, and all that happened before the movie star became famous in the first place. The producer knows that releasing the tape will hurt her career and offers her to buy the tape to prevent it from being released. This doesn't seem like blackmail at all, and the only change was to the moral (and legal) status of releasing the tape, not to the trade.
I still classify it as blackmail.
Something similar to this happened to Cameron Diaz although the rights to resell the photos were questionable. She posed topless in some bondage shots for a magazine, but they were never printed. The photographer kept the shots and the recording of the photo shoot for ten years until one of the Charlie's Angel's films was about to come out. He offered them to her for a couple of million or he would sell them to the highest bidder. The courts didn't buy that he was just offering her first right of refusal and sentenced him for attempted grand theft (blackmail), forgery, and perjury (for modifying release forms and lying about it). Link
Are you sure you aren't just pattern matching to similarity to known types of blackmail? Do you think it would be useful for an AI to classify it the same way (which was the starting point of this thread)?
Your link doesn't go into much detail, but it seems like he was convicted because he was lying and making up the negative consequences he threatened her with, and like he was going out of his way to make the consequences of selling to someone else as bad as possible rather than maximizing revenue (or at least making her believe so). That would qualify this case as blackmail under the definition above, unlike either of our hypothetical examples.