By the time Hollie Toups, Marianna Taschinger and dozens more women from small towns in Texas have settled their lawsuit against Web host GoDaddy.com and website Texxxan.com, their names will be permanently associated with images they never intended anyone to see.

Whether they win or lose their case - and there is a very good chance they will lose - they will have to live with the fact that employers, family members and friends will always link them with private photographs and public humiliation. For years, they will be harassed and distressed.

But at least they can say they fought back. If nothing else, their battle represents a new front in the war against the ways the Internet is used to reinforce discrimination against women. And their story offers lessons for the rest of us about the role we have in changing destructive online behavior.

Toups, Taschinger and the others are plaintiffs in a groundbreaking class-action lawsuit against a "revenge porn" website. Texxxan.com is a typical example of these sites in that it allowed users, often disgruntled ex-boyfriends, to post nude photos of women, along with detailed personal information, without the women's permission. For the last several years, these sites have been sprouting up like mushrooms, often being shut down not for their vile content but for violating web hosts' terms of service or running afoul of child pornography laws. Perhaps the best-known predecessor to Texxxxan.com was IsAnyoneUp.com, which launched in 2010 and at its peak brought in around $13,000 a month in advertising revenue, according to founder Hunter Moore. (Moore was later investigated by the FBI for posting pictures of underage girls.)

Texxxxan.com may be the first "revenge porn" site to face a lawsuit from those who have been wronged. The site's former Web host, GoDaddy.com, also is named in the suit, along with its members who paid for subscriptions.

The lawsuit states that Texxxan.com "is significantly designed to cause severe embarrassment, humiliation, and emotional distress" to the plaintiffs.

If anything, that's understating the case.

Taschinger, 22, said she doesn't always feel safe leaving her house. "There have been times when I wanted to go out, to get my cat, and I had to wait for my brother-in-law to get home," she said. "I don't want to go out alone, because I don't know what might happen."

In December, Texxxan.com published nude photos of an 18-year-old Taschinger, submitted by an ex-boyfriend (now in his mid-30s), along with her address. She lives in Groves, Texas - population 14,393.

Taschinger said she hasn't even been able to think about how the photos will affect her prospects for education and employment - right now she's still worried about her safety. "Normal people don't subscribe to sites like this," she said. "Only creeps. Knowing that those are the kinds of people who know where I live, and (the harassment) is only going to get worse before it gets better, I never feel safe."

Thirty-two-year-old Hollie Toups of Nederland, Texas - population 17,547 - is the original plaintiff in the case. She has no idea who posted her photos on the site, some of which were taken to track her weight loss progress and never left her possession. She says she may never know who sent her photos six months ago to Texxxan.com. What she does know is that when she contacted the site, the owner offered to take down her photos for a fee - and that was when she decided to stand up for herself.

"It had to stop somewhere," Toups said. "I have my family to think about, my future to think about. And the fact that there were so many other girls on that site - I mean, there were about 50 of us just from this little area alone, some of them were underage - at some point, someone had to say that this can be fought. We had to take back control of our lives."

If it doesn't seem fair that these young women could have their lives and futures compromised simply because an old boyfriend or a stranger wanted to humiliate them, that's because it's not. It's completely unfair - but it might not be completely illegal.

"I think it's a bit of a legal reach," said Erica Johnstone, a partner with the San Francisco law firm Ridder, Costa, and Johnstone LLP who specializes in online harassment. Johnstone said that both the Web host, GoDaddy.com, and the website's owner are likely to claim immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which offers websites broad protections against legal liability for content created by other people. (GoDaddy.com has taken down Texxxan.com for violation of its terms of service - the website's owner used a fake name and address to register it.)

Texxxan.com's owner, who used the name James Smith to answer questions, said he is completely confident of his ability to fight the lawsuit.

"It's completely bogus," he wrote in an e-mail regarding the lawsuit, citing Section 230. "The site is legal, the pictures won't go away, and (this lawyer) has only made it worse for the girls."

Smith told some of the plaintiffs that he has multiple websites and has kept their pictures. He blames them for their predicament, not himself: "When you take a nude photograph of yourself and you send it to this other person, or when you allow someone to take a nude photograph of you, by your very actions you have reduced your expectation of privacy."

Smith still cares about his own privacy, though. When asked why he wouldn't reveal his real name, he said, "Because I choose to keep my private life private. I don't need the headaches that publicity brings."

How convenient for him.

And how indicative of the larger problems that revenge porn points to - that some people are allowed to maintain their privacy online, no matter how reprehensible their actions might be, and others are denied the opportunity to have any privacy at all.

"Essentially what's being said with a case like this is that (Smith) has been allowed to participate in a public forum and destroy other people's lives without suffering any consequences," said Professor Mary Anne Franks, an associate professor of law at the University of Miami. "It's an incredibly ugly statement about society when you put that in a larger context of discrimination and power."

By allowing anonymity for those who would seek to shame and humiliate others - usually people who already suffer from powerlessness within society - the Internet can actually be used to reinforce our offline status quo of discrimination.

"It's very easy to say, 'Oh, no one should take naked pictures,' " Franks said. "It's very easy to say that the best way to avoid this kind of suffering for yourself is to limit your own freedom. But if you look at who suffers the online consequence of, say, taking naked pictures, or even just suffering sexual harassment for no reason at all, it's not men. It's women, and it's girls. It's another way of saying that women and girls don't have the right to be in a public space."

Adrian Chen knows all about that. Chen, a 28-year-old senior staff writer for the media gossip site Gawker, has developed a reputation for revealing the personalities behind some of the darker, more misogynist corners of the Internet. In 2010, after he explained that a group of users on the enormous Internet message board 4chan were publicly humiliating and bullying Jessi Slaughter, an 11-year-old girl, 4chan users attacked Gawker's website, released the passwords of its staff writers, and published Chen's personal information.

"If you push against this sort of thing with an online community, they'll swarm you, send you thousands of e-mails, threaten you, and try to hack you," Chen said. "It can be disastrous."

Still, he stepped back into the fray in October when he discovered the identity of a 49-year-old Texas man who ran some of the worst and most popular forums on the enormous Internet site Reddit - ones full of pictures taken covertly of women in public, pictures of undressed teenage girls that have been posted without their consent, and all manner of racist and gory imagery.

Chen contacted the man, programmer Michael Brutsch, and then posted his name on Gawker. When his employer discovered what Brutsch had been doing, he decided that Brutsch was not someone who should be in his workplace - and so Brutsch lost his job. No criminal charges have been filed against him.

Hundreds of Reddit forums blocked Gawker's links after Chen's action, claiming that Chen had somehow violated Brutsch's "free speech rights." The CEO of Reddit, Yishan Wong, wrote in a memo leaked to Gawker that his site stands "for free speech" and bemoaned "the problem of irresponsible release of personal information to the general public."

The free speech and the rights of those who were violated by Brutsch's activities were not considered in their discussion.

They need to be considered in the broader discussion. "I just don't think that anonymity is a value that we should try to protect above and beyond other people's rights," Chen said. "There are definitely legitimate reasons for anonymity online. But ganging up on people isn't one of them."

It's sort of incredible that this sentiment still needs to be stated in 2013, but our laws - and apparently, our morality - haven't caught up with our technology.

"Once you've reached that level of being able to destroy someone's life completely, the law gets very difficult because the Internet's one step ahead of our legal framework," Franks said. "There could be a very specific legal fix for the revenge porn problem through federal legislation. For others, it might be a question of changing the social norms."

"Changing the social norms" is, always has been and always will be a long, risky and challenging process. But there is some evidence that it's already starting to happen.

One of the more interesting aspects of the horrific rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, last year (wherein high school football players were accused of documenting their rape of a drunken 16-year-old girl) was the role played by hackers in publicly shaming those who taunted the victim or documented her rape.

By releasing a slew of offensive tweets, e-mails and videos from residents of the town - of which the best known was a disgusting 12-minute diatribe from Michael Nodianos, an Ohio State University student who has since dropped out of school, citing threats - the hackers (known only as Batcat and KYAnonymous) drew a lot of attention to the case. The publicity also caused those who were humiliating the victim to stop and apologize publicly.

Was the hackers' behavior extralegal? Sure.

Was it the only response we have to combat the use of the Internet to ritually shame and humiliate women and girls? At the moment, yes.

That represents a failure of the law to protect women and a failure of Internet users to create spaces where the rights of all people are considered and respected.