In a landmark case, an art student in the U.K. faced charges of making “revenge porn” this past week after featuring a cropped image of her ex-boyfriend in her art show. A student at University of Lincoln, Lauren Smith  had put a call out on social media asking for a male model to help her with an art project about the female gaze. Failing to find a willing collaborator, she decided to include a heavily cropped version of an ex-boyfriend, among other images. Smith was charged after her ex-boyfriend discovered the photo and claimed to be “embarrassed” by the discovery.

According to the British newspaper, The Telegraph, the judge presiding over Smith’s case expressed “real misgivings” over how the defendant’s case being handled by prosectors. “It’s an image within a number of images in a piece of artwork submitted to university and marked for its artistic merit,” he said. “How does anyone know it’s him?”

While revenge porn is, indeed, a 21st-century concern, particularly in Great Britain, where legal authorities have been working tirelessly to combat the issue, this particularly instance fell well outside the standard purview of such cases. One of the reasons for Smith’s art project falling under such scrutiny (it earned her a first, it should be noted) is due to a law passed by British Parliament in 2015 handing the police greater powers to prosecute those who “share private sexual materials with intent to cause distress.” The charge carries with it a punishment of up to two years in prison.

Fortunately for Smith, after some deliberation, prosectors determined that the piece, which heavily obscured Smith’s former partner’s face, was indeed a work of art and not a deliberate act of revenge. As the prosecution finally admitted: “We were all in agreement that now we have consideration of the art project and looking at the case properly in the round, we cannot put this forward to a jury.”