zlacker

Because a legal case under the current justice system and legislative framework would probably take hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to bring a case that requires discovery and a trial to accomplish.

Maybe (maybe!) it’s worth it for someone like Johansson to take on the cost of that to vindicate her rights—but it’s certainly not the case for most people.

If your rights can only be defended from massive corporations by bringing lawsuits that cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, then only the wealthy will have those rights.

So maybe she wants new legislative frameworks around these kind of issues to allow people to realistically enforce these rights that nominally exist.

For an example of updating a legislative framework to allow more easily vindicating existing rights, look up “anti-SLAPP legislation”, which many states have passed to make it easier for a defendant of a meritless lawsuit seeking to chill speech to have the lawsuit dismissed. Anti-SLAPP legislation does almost nothing to change the actual rights that a defendant has to speak, but it makes it much more practical for a defendant to actually excercise those rights.

So, the assumption that a call for updated legislation implies that no legal protection currently exists is just a bad assumption that does not apply in this situation.