I don't have any sympathy for Pornhub here. Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users, and it wasn't until they hollowed out the rest of the industry through theft that they started looking beyond it.
I would go so far as to say that the reason Pornhub and other tube sites haven't taken problems like child porn and revenge porn seriously is because doing so would undermine the foundation of their business: stolen content.
On the other hand, this might ultimately work in their favor if it has the effect of raising the bridge they've just crossed. If it gets harder host stolen content, Pornhub has to worry less about someone else doing to them what they've done to others now that they are making a switch to paid content.
> Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users,
Not disagreeing with you, but, to be fair, that was exactly Youtube's recipe for success, and still is to some extent. I never understood how Youtube could get away with that.
My understanding is that copyrighted content on Youtube is often uploaded under the guise of anonymous users, but this is illusory. Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. One think you'll notice is that not just corporate sponsored content is region-locked; sometimes "anonymous" user videos get region locked. That is not a coincidence.
All of which to say, I expect this to be the same case on PH. There's the usual wackamole game of unauthorized content being taken down, but much of what stays up from unauthorized sources probably does so out of permission that is not apparent on the surface.
I think streaming companies place a premium on the appearance of content coming from users, and this is the result. If I'm right, then changes may not significantly alter the level of traffic to PH, which is what everyone is soothsaying about: that users will just go elsewhere. But I'm curious what's going to happen.
Like you said, PH's model looks to ape youtube's, and the latter does not appear to be entirely reliant on "stolen" content.
> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. One think you'll notice is that not just corporate sponsored content is region-locked; sometimes "anonymous" user videos get region locked. That is not a coincidence.
This is all much less nefarious than you make it sound.
When a rights-holder finds their IP in a video, they have the option of how to proceed. They can choose to take the video down completely, run ads and receive all or a share of the revenue, etc.
If they choose to leave it up, it's almost always because they are receiving all of the revenue from the video now so they have no reason to take it down. There's no smokey back room deals going on here, this is just the rights enforcement tools provided by YouTube.
Rights-holders do not always hold global rights to content and if the video contains content from multiple rights-holders, there are several competing claims that all need to be resolved.
The reason the videos uploaded by users eventually end up resembling the videos uploaded by the rights-holder is because YouTube provides a mechanism for rights-holders to enforce the same restrictions they operate under on their content even when they weren't the ones to upload it.
Source: I work in a company that does this, though not directly on that side of the business.
There are account penalization i.e. a strike system associated with frequent infringement complaints, and it doesn't take many. While it's certainly the case that copyright holders will simply take over the revenue from unauthorized videos, my expectation is that most of these uploaders are not unwitting anonymous types: they actually represent the company. I had read an article years ago detailing that this can be the case but I can't be arsed to find it right now.
It's not a huge leap when you consider it's also been revealed that a good chunk of torrents at one time had been seeded by IPs belonging to corporates.
Youtube has broad 'covenant not to sue' contracts with various rights holding organizations which allows them to safely leave up infringing works while the rights holders can avoid paying residuals to artists whos contracts lacked the foresight to anticipate this kind of fraud.
AFAIK porn performers don't generally get paid residuals, so there probably less interest in this sort of skulduggery.
This most certainly wasn't the case for YouTube in the early days either. Once Google took over they were WAY more strict about locking down infringing works.
> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance
This is not universally true. For example, you can go on YouTube right now and probably find all sorts of music videos not hosted by the actual artists, so long as it’s older or more obscure music. Plus at this point it’s kind of moot; they already gained their user base from the first several years of illegal new content.
If youtube user bigbubba420 uploads a music video for an 80s synthpop song he doesn't own, the copyright owner for that video informs youtube of their ownership claim and revenue from the video an anonymous user uploaded is redirected into their pockets.
Also if travel_vlogger happens to walk by a store playing the radio, the ownership of their video and revenue is given to the music company and you can't do anything about it. Just easier to steal from the little guy.
This is true, though now bigbubba420 gets a strike on his account for the complaint and inches closer to a ban. And music uploaders throw on a ton of content, so I don't see how it can merely be a case of ad revenues taken over and continuing to do the same with impunity.
Be aware you're comparing Google to a much smaller company. Of course they had the ability to do full DRM search much sooner. I'd look through the lens of technical hurdles much before I'd look through the lens of moralism.
This is a good point. I don't think MindGeek is as sophisticated in detecting and taking down infringing content. However, complaints do get filed and videos do get taken down for infringing.
After a Lot of suffering. I believe there was an incident recently in which Pornhub refused to take down videos of a minor in what was an obvious situation of revenge porn.
Yeah, well that means they got their priorities reversed badly, for this kind of business.
I think the current model should have been the default from the start - if verified, paid content creators were the only ones allowed, they would get a much bigger share from their videos.
> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance,
Yeah, right. Tell that to the flood of channels which will take cut single scenes out of tv series and twitch recordings and upload them to YT monetized.
I would expect it applies to the separate cases, but not to an account which exists only for that purpose. There are cases where whole episodes / movies are split into pieces and posted in a playlist.
Despite people complaining about how draconian DMCA take down notices are, the DMCA safe harbor is incredibly generous. Service providers have no affirmative duty to police user uploaded content unless they have actual knowledge of infringing materials or "facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent."
It's basically a don't ask/don't tell system.
Courts have been reluctant to require any active investigation even when faced with very large number of valid take-down requests.
Youtube is more proactive than most (CotentID) due to settlements and agreements with its major partners.
I mean, they were facing down a bilion-dollar lawsuit and only avoided that on a technicality. Then spent a huge amount of money (and reputation) on ContentID.
Is that even really true? Movies ETC that are aggressively removed and don't stay on youtube for long if at all. Maybe it used to be more lenient, but I can't remember the last time I saw something on youtube like that.
That's the story for every publisher or platform. Even the United States didn't take copyright seriously until it was big enough and had something worth protecting.
It probably didn't have much to do with the law, clearly. I don't know why non-lawyer HN commenters are so obsessed about litigating the law.
People just really like it, including lawmakers themselves.
It's probably like with Uber - its riders ended up enacting the law that made the cheap prices possible. Or Airbnb. Or a lot of other stuff. Operating in a legal gray area for years.
Or maybe its more comparable to the difference in punishment between doing cocaine and doing crack. Although that Toronto mayor did do crack, so I don't know if cocaine is strictly the drug among lawmakers. Certainly preferred rich people, including rich politicians.
The really twisted thing is, what does that say about porn? Sure, Nicholas Kristoff might be reprinting talking points by a few purity crusaders. But for some things, like the unverified content being not just pirated, but sometimes abusive, they might be right?
I believe YouTube could get away with it due to a lucky right time purchase by Google which made content owners put back the swords they were starting to pull because "scary money monster that sends us traffic might get bad".
Not to mention, that likely it has an overall positive effect on the old school "content industry".
After all, if there are old songs on YT then people can send them to others (see RickRoll), listen to them (playlists), keep them in the collective zeitgeist. So copyright holders have avenues to profit from these activities. If YT purges content likely those tracks would just disappear fast from the minds of folks who mostly listen music on YT.
Absolutely. In the olden days, the industry would make direct revenue off of this discovery/remembrance through sampler or collection albums/CDs. Usually cheaper than regular media, but not free. What they lost in revenue with YouTube, they gained in the frictionless process of a potential customer tasting or revisiting new material, and the social networking gains through instant sharing to new audiences. I assume the industry has seen this as a net win, and a win-win with their customers. The formal legal protections get in the way, and so they are in practice ignored unless the releases get out of hand. Seems to be working...
Same dynamic with archive.org and used book sellers, although there everything is PD. Would be nice for the not-yet-PD-but impossible-to-monetize book content from, say 1930-1980, had the same scheme in place for online content. I suppose the books-to-borrow function on archive.org or the online lending platforms in local libraries provide that function.
Pinterest is even worse because it hijacks image search with their stolen content pretending it's the only available source and the source, while at same time forcing browsing users to register.
I don't think Pornhub behaves in same way neither YT or more comparable imgur.
The relevant law here is the DMCA, which gives safe harbor to anyone hosting 3rd party content if they respond to timely takedown requests, which YouTube does.
My understanding is YouTube technically doesn't deal with many DMCA take downs. Their reporting system is technically a voluntary system in front of DMCA.
Large IP holders are happy to use it because it heavily favors them. Large IP holders also don't have to worry about repercussions for false or incorrect DMCA claims.
I've been in a few discussions on Reddit where people said this is a half-truth. Perhaps someone can confirm?
From Wikipedia[0]: § 512(c) also requires that the OSP: 1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, 2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, and 3) upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material.
This is an 'and' which I take to mean safe harbour takedown (the 3rd clause) only applies if the other two are also true. So the host must not know it exists (plausible for YouTube) and not receive a direct financial benefit (does Ad revenue count?).
DMCA safe harbor (copyright) instead of section 230 (moderation for content), but yeah, that sounds right. Before Content ID existed, they could convincingly say they didn't have automatic means and they were taking all commercially reasonable efforts to respond to manual reports, and meanwhile their staff couldn't keep up with people uploading new infringing content.
Oh come on, don't make me spell it out for you. Revenge porn preys on women, child porn preys on children. Having these videos up, and allowing people to upload them, actively hurts people. Nobody is getting hurt if people watch Family Guy on youtube.
Individual humans are not directly demeaned and violated by copying TV shows.
They are by non-consensual porn.
I personally believe strongly that porn demeans, dehumanizes, and violates the people in it, even when it's consensual (and my understanding is that consensuality and non-abusive working conditions are much rarer than most porn consumers think).
I realize that opinion would be quite unpopular around here.
you comment on "non-consensual porn" may be what the GP meant, but s/he used the term "stolen porn" which I took to mean simply a copy that the user was unauthorized to upload, i.e. I download a movie then share it, not so-called revenge porn. I'd say in the first case, they are roughly equivalent wrongs, but in the case of revenge porn, I'd say distributing that publicly is an much higher moral wrong.
Disagree. ContentID was a proprietary tech for content recognition that made YouTube not get inundated with copyrighted material. YT is successful because they handled the issue, not because they didn't.
YouTube was successful long before ContentID. Perhaps they managed to stay successful by handling the issue, but their initial success was certainly not due to handling the issue.
From the article, Pornhub only had 118 incidences of child porn over the last 3 years whereas Facebook had 84 million incidents of child porn during the same time. So it sounds like Pornhub is taking child porn seriously, and Facebook isn't.
Two more likely possibilities: (1) Pornhub wasn't really checking, which is an easy way to get good stats.* (2) Many of Facebook's 84 million incidents took place on private groups or Messenger chats with small numbers of participants, whereas a single PornHub upload (counted as "1 incident") could easily reach hundreds of thousands of people. Fundamentally difficult to compare private communications networks with broadcast systems, they provide different opportunities for problematic content.
* ETA: Facebook is an industry leader on CSAM scanning, and has developed both its own algorithms and media databases. So your comment that "Facebook isn't taking the issue seriously" seems like exactly the wrong diagnosis. Facebook's high numbers are a consequence of putting serious effort into this area. (Whether scanning of private messages is actually effective in stopping distribution of the content, that's something I'm more skeptical of.)
> (1) Pornhub wasn't really checking, which is an easy way to get good stats.*
Those were external checks, no self-report. So the real question is whether those checks were insufficient and just found the tip of the mountain, or whether pornhub was acutually doing serious checks for this stuff and doing quite well in that.
In later case it also opens the question on whether the reports were really childporn, or just some disputable case which be acceptable in some country or time, and problematic in other countries or times. Or whether they just missed them. Or whether there is some darker reason behind them.
I think it's very likely that pornhub really had a system to prevent the nasty stuff, after all they are were big and old and not stupid enough to ignore those easy targets that would kill them fast. Their fast reaction this time shows that they are very focused on surviving.
Ive personally taken dozens of reports where people were 100% sure and disgusted, even from some moderators who were supposed to know more about this - and it turned out the people were all over 18.
I'm sure we can find stories on both sides of this argument.
I lived in South East Asia for a while and the cell phone footage of sexual interactions between middle school students is what I reported. These are girls wearing middle school uniforms embroidered with the school's name on the shirt [1] which indicates that the woman is under 18.
Nobody would bother to replicate the uniform for 2 minutes of shaky cell phone footage. It was underage material. Plain and simple.
My own ex-girlfriend's photographs were uploaded to XHamster by her ex-boyfriend along with a copy of her passport. She's 17 in the images. Took us over a year to get them taken down.
I feel for you situation, and I'm sorry you and those around you have had such issues.
Indeed your mention of the uniform, along with it being shaky cell phone imagery, would cause me to moderate such an upload if it was brought to my attention - I would stop it from public availability and notify the uploader that they could respond with proof of age and rights if they'd like to prove the claim wrong. (99% of the time that does not happen)
Sadly, I can't say that you are 100% right on the uniform thing - especially in certain places, copying such uniforms or acquiring exact copies and using such for videos is kind of common.
Fake-revenge porn is actually a thing, and has been for a long time. There are some slick web sites out there that try to make it look like it's 'stolen / hidden video' of girls next door - but it's actually now budget / average girls selling vids cheap and it's packaged in a way to make it seem real.
With that being said, there are also some 'parasite sites' that take imagery of people out of context and use it for sexualized viewing without the person's consent - and I abhor that.
There are also people who do revenge porn, and blackmail porn I would say it's likely even more prevalent. That kind of thing really ticks me off too.
I don't know a lot about xhams, but I'm pretty sure they play with different jurisdictions and rules that pornhub and some others - so I'm not going to comment on the way they do things.
I will mention that I do get quite a few 'takedown requests' from cam models, so many do not understand how affiliate promos work, partner promotion agreements, APIs and such.. sometimes they also push dmca complaints to google and others in an attempt to rush a pic removal... I have also seen some people working with these models who get 'creative' in their removal requests, putting in emails to me (and likely to our hosting companies, google, etc) - that "not only are these pics not authorized for use, but they we're under 17 when they were made" -
As to where I am sure this works to speed up the deletion process for some, it's a shitty thing to do for many reasons - but it is done a fair amount. With so many of these fake take down notices, it's not easy for a moderating team to sort out what is legit and what is not.
It's obvious to me that sometimes this is done by a new boyfriend / husband who is trying to remove past history of their lover's porn work.
It also clogs up our system of support emails. So there is much more to these issues than most people who would file a legit request would know.
Here's the original press statement from Pornhub's blog:
>Over the last three years, Facebook self-reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material. During that same period, the independent, third-party Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub.
Organizations like the IWF rely on reports, whether self-reported or not. Most people report CSAM on the website they're visiting instead of going to a third party (at least I do unless nothing is being done about it). Therefore it's not a surprise that the IWF only reported 118 incidents on Pornhub. It would be interesting to know how many instances Pornhub self-reported during the same time period since a high number is actually a good thing. I'd imagine that a sizeable chunk of the Facebook reports were quickly taken down due to being recognized by CSAM detection algorithms.
The PornHub count was an external study, the Facebook count was internal. So if either is effected by internal standards not counting things, its the Facebook number.
Isn't Pornhub's content always public, whereas Facebook's can be segregated to smaller groups of people? If that's the case it seems that illegal content could remain undetected for far longer on FB rather than Pornhub.
I’m not an expert on PH, but from what I understand from other sources they have a mix of public content, open-to-all-paid-customers content, and private content that is available only to subscribers to particular channels.
I don’t know if they have any content owner (well, submitter, given the level of piracy) controls on who can see content at the specific user level (whether by restricting allowed subscriptions to channels with an owner-approval process or by having content restricted by something other than subscription status.)
A former co-worker was telling me about a porn streaming company she worked for in Spain. They stole content from other sites, the other sites stole from them and their competitors. No one wanted to go to courts because no one had clean hands so they started breaking into each other's buildings (self hosting on-site was the norm at the time) and smashing up servers. Eventually they all hired security made up of less than reputable guards who probably were the same guys who had been breaking in to beat up servers. She left around that time to work for more mainstream employers but it does point to the shady beginnings of many of these companies.
Both Google and YouTube contain stolen and illegal content. There are lots of full length pirate movies on YT for instance. It doesn’t make it right but I just mean all companies should be equally judged by rules and regulations
What you may not realize is that if that "stolen" media is logged in ContentID, both Google and the proper rightsholders are making money by running ads off every view (if they decide not to block it outright.)
I believe many folks don't understand this and therefore wonder why random YT accounts can post clearly copyrighted material. Content owners can fairly easily capture the monetization of these videos even if its not under their account. Oftentimes it's best to just leave a video up especially if it has many views (and strong search visibility) and collect the $$ from the ads on it.
Nope. YouTube just takes independent content down. On the other hand, YouTube allows original creators to monetize over those pirated content, by transferring all ads proceedings.
On the other hand, there's naked yoga on YouTube so....
As I pointed out the other day in the comments of an article about Crunchyroll, they're actually a much better example than Pornhub. Much like YouTube, sites like Pornhub have the excuse that they ostensibly exist to let people upload their own, often amateur, content - and there was a lot of really good amateur content on there. Which, naturally, the commercial porn industry wanted to eradicate just as much as the pirated stuff because it was their direct competition. Part of the problem was that there's an inherent assymetry to this - it only takes a few really keen exhibitionists wanting to show off to entertain a much larger group of fans across the globe. Another part is that there's all kinds of niche content that, despite being both consensual and legal, isn't well served by mainstream porn (and in some cases can't be due to Masterard and Visa).
Crunchyroll at least needed a team of translators to create subtitles for Naruto (and other anime circa the mid 00s). That is to say: Crunchyroll may have copyrihgt-infringed upon anime, but they added value. Naruto and Shippuden never would have found a subtitled audience without that team of translators. (And the English dub was relatively low quality back then, believe it)
I'm not sure how Youtube or Pornhub adds value to the content.
> Crunchyroll at least needed a team of translators to create subtitles for Naruto (and other anime circa the mid 00s). That is to say: Crunchyroll may have copyrihgt-infringed upon anime, but they added value.
Most of the content on Crunchyroll was fansubbed by various IRC and torrent groups and used without permissions of the original copyright holders or of the fansub groups and without credit to the fansubbers. So, actually, no, they didn't need a team of translators, and there's a lot of anime fans who refuse to do business with Crunchyroll because of their betrayal of the fansub community.
I remember Dattebayo fansubs, one of those torrent fansub groups you're talking about. I remember when they shutdown and announced support for Crunchyroll, suggesting that legitimate paid streaming was the future for anyone who actually wanted to support the anime subtitle community.
Perhaps I wasn't remembering the full politics of mid 00s subtitle culture... its been a very long time since then. But for Dattebayo at least, they were quite clear on throwing their support behind Crunchyroll, to the point where it was rumored that Dattebayo was probably working with Crunchyroll. (Though I'm not sure if that was ever confirmed)
With hundreds of thousands of torrent hits per week, Dattebayo fansubs probably was one of the largest torrent fansubbers of that time. I tried to search for a history of those groups, but alas, it seems lost to time. I just got my personal memories to guide me.
---------
You're right in that those early fansubber / torrent / IRC groups were all separate groups with different politics. But from my perspective, the big groups (ie: Dattebayo) were definitely all in on supporting Crunchyroll.
I think your retrospective is very Dattebayo centric and distorted.
Most big fansubbing groups hated CR back in the days when CR started, since CR took their fansunbs to fuel their business.
Once CR started to make/pay for their own translations (also hiring translators from some groups in the background) the situation got better, since then a clear, legal path was visible for the community.
I don't know anything about any of these groups (I do like anime), but they had to know from the beginning that voluntary subtitling would never make any money. Even if copyright law were intended to help regular people rather than giant corporations, their work was entirely based on material they had questionable "right" to use in the first place. They scratched their own itch, and later CR had an itch too. It could be that Dattebayo always had a more complete understanding of the situation than other fansub groups had.
> but they had to know from the beginning that voluntary subtitling would never make any money.
Exactly zero of the fansubbing groups ever did it to make money. For most people, they were in it for the community, which included things like the prestige of having your name associated with a popular/successful project. The reason the fansub community was upset at CrunchyRoll was because not only did they take the content, they edited it to remove the intros and other forms of attribution to the original fansubbers.
If they had left in attribution, nobody would have cared, and CrunchyRoll would have been treated like any number of other torrent to streaming sites that existed.
> Most big fansubbing groups hated CR back in the days when CR started, since CR took their fansunbs to fuel their business.
I mean, Dattebayo definitely criticized CR at first. But by the time Dattebayo closed shop, they were highly supportive of CR. That's why its important to remember the names of these groups. Do you remember the large-fansub group and/or which anime you're talking about?
Its hard for me to think of a bigger group than Dattebayo back then. Dattebayo covered Naruto and Bleach subs, as well as a bunch of lesser known anime.
During the illegal content days, Crunchyroll wasn't subbing the videos. Those were uploaded by dedicated fansub teams who did the actual work and CR was just another anime tube site.
I’m not saying it’s a direct comparison, just that bootstrapping off of content theft is pretty par for the course for the internet, be it individual creators or entire websites. I also don’t see it as a good thing, but at least with anime fansubbers it is kind of a begrudgingly accepted reality that this kind of activity helps create the market that allows the legitimate player to exist.
It seems somewhat arbitrary where the line is drawn between "growth hack" and "clearly undermining copyrighted content"
Thinking specifically about Napster and MegaUpload. Is it because there was no value beyond simply sharing files? If there was a presentation layer + user accounts on top, would they have been spared?
There was value beyond sharing files, music sharing services had decent search and music previewing.
I think a music sharing site I used let you see the other music files a user was sharing, so if you thought they had good taste you could check out other things too.
Not that I'm defending the theft or IP or technology, but it is interesting how some things we consider stealing, others homage and some that we simply ignore. No one would complain if spies from your own country stole from a rival nation during a war (hot or cold). The US used to steal technology from Britain and the rest of Europe.[0]
The more you magnify on any country's history, the more prevalent shady dealings comes up. This goes doubly so for superpowers. It seems that at some point in time, everyone has done unscrupulous things to get ahead and we often forget to be introspective.
On a personal anecdote, I dabble in fashion design and it continually baffles me as to what is considered "homage" when large, established companies blatantly rip off designs. Large companies like H&M or Zara can literally steal pieces from famous designers, make it worse and cheaper and sell it in malls worldwide. Obviously, when an Asian brand does the same thing, it's a knockoff. Peeves me to no end.
I always wondered why YouTube was required to be quite strict with policing such matters but many pornography websites somehow remain quite operational despite the vast amount of obviously infringing material.
YouTube is much stricter than what the law requires. I think the general consensus is that YouTube tries to stay on MPAA's and RIAA's good side to keep them from lobbying for stricter laws. As long as it's easier to talk to YouTube than to write a new law everyone profits (except the independent content creators).
Paid porn doesn't have a strong lobby, so there is no similar pressure on PornHub/MindGeek.
I would not be at all surprised if the American jury system would be fairly against plaintiffs if they're in any way connected to pornography considering the American moral values.
Well at issue is why, hypothetically, YT or PH might find themselves before the bar.
YouTube would be afraid of being sued for copyright infringement. PornHub is legitimately afraid of being indicted in a criminal conspiracy to distribute child pornography.
With respect to just the copyright claim, I don't think there would necessarily be any bias, as it would be pitting pornography producers vs. pornography distributers. Both pretty slimy if you feel that way.
Hah! This comment made me think about how I personally started to both really hate advertising/advertising companies, and I also find it more morally questionable than I find porn, to the point that if someone told me they worked for google or some other advertising network, I would silently be judging them for their life choices, but if someone told me that they worked for a porn company I'd probably be like "oh, what's that like?". Right or wrong, advertisement is leaving a very sour taste behind, to the point where for me personally it seems to have overtaken other things, like porn.
Surely you must mean the targeted advertisements and data collection necessary for that. I don't see anything inherently wrong with an advertisement in and of itself, and it certainly isn't morally questionable. Companies need consumers to be aware of their products in order to sell them.
> if someone told me they worked for google or some other advertising network, I would silently be judging them for their life choices
I strongly agree with Banksy's view on advertisement:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
While I think there are some forms of advertisement that are acceptable or even desirable, what we see on the internet is not that, mostly due to the tracking and targeting, which almost every advertisement company is doing, but also because adverts are inherently trying to trick, pressure or encourage you to spend money on something even if you don't really want or need it.
> Maybe try some introspection.
I have. I've come to the conclusion that I judge people who work in industries I find morally questionable.
You don't see any hint of irony in that statement from someone who leaves artwork in public spaces without asking the general public for permission first? The same artist who destroys his own art, which he left in public, when someone tries to "own" it?
Claiming that everyone who works at Google works on Ads is like saying everyone who works at Amazon moves boxes in a warehouse.
I’m not making a value judgement on Banksy, just that I agree with that particular statement of his.
Re: second paragraph, I didn’t claim that everyone at google works on ads, you made that up. You don’t have to work on an immoral thing just an immoral employer for me to question your morals.
YouTube made their deals with the various industries pretty early on IIRC. Not sure there was a decision as to who did or didn't have to make these deals as much as visibility and their own willingness to make these deals just resulted in earlier deals.
you can say this same thing about Airbnb. how many listings are illegal? and yet they don’t proactively purge illegal listings unless some city aggressively goes after them in court.
None of AirBnb listings were likely illegal in the early days, because what they were doing was not regulated.
Also, I’d say there’s a big difference between the homeowner choosing to list their home against a city regulation that the homeowner is choosing to violate, versus users uploading content that they don’t own in the first place.
Even a tenant who is AirBnb’ing their unit against their lease terms is at least listing their own unit / choosing to violate an agreement that they themselves have signed.
AirBnb to me is unique in that their regulations came afterward to combat the monumental rise of short term rentals, whereas Section 230 / DMCA regulations are what enabled the other sites to ultimately growth hack on the back of infringement.
I mean, it depends where you were, I suppose. In many places, Airbnbs were illegal from the start (at least for the whole-home rental type; the rent a room type are much fuzzier), as they breached planning rules that only allowed residential use for particular buildings etc.
it’s not a big difference. both platforms are looking the other way when it comes to policing illegal content on their platforms because they make money off it whether it’s legal or not. they are choosing to offload the responsibility to the users as much as possible.
don't think majority was stolen content. but a lot of amateur content was on there. were people uploaded their videos etc without risk of getting identified. it's a hobby to some people. like the article states, majority of the content wasn't even porn. But yeah, open upload platforms will end up being abused e.g look at how unlimited amazon cloud storage got abused.
To some extent, education in schools in regards to consent, relationships, and how issues like this effect people could help to reduce the number of incidences of revenge porn. It isn't just harmless fun, it has very serious consequences.
Sadly, it'll be impossible to stop it entirely with the unverified upload model.
>Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users
I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hackernews act like he has done nothing wrong and is a victim. Now the community is against a business being built on uploading stolen content by anonymous users?
> I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hackernews act like he has done nothing wrong and is a victim
Of course he has done wrong, but the fact why people are standing up for him is he did not do it while being in the US. It is one thing if the US asks for extradition of a criminal who committed the crime in the US, but an entirely different thing if the criminal committed the crime in another country - and that doesn't even answer the question if what the criminal did is actually a crime in that country.
It's already a legal stretch to arrest and punish pedophiles who fly out to Asia to rape children (because enforcing the laws against child rape should be something for the destination countries!), but the Dotcom and Assange sagas should not result in extradition.
Especially since Kim Dotcom isn't an American citizen neither. So a third country citizen did something in another third country that the US didn't like. Quite a thing to aks for extradition in that case, especially from a country that doesn't recognize the court in The Hague.
I am still not what to think about Assange. WikiLeaks did great things in the early days, and I was half convinced the affair in Sweden was a set-up. If it was not, Sweden would have been the place to put him on trial. And not to use it as am excuse to arrest in Britain to have him extradited to the US.
That being said, it seems WikiLeaks was at least complicit in Russia propaganda operations. And we have no way to tell whether that would have happened without the arrest. Complicated story. And still a trial I hate to see, if Assange gets convicted, there is no way to be sure that doesn't happen to other journalists as well.
it's a reasonable mistake to make, but it's probably not correct.
dang made a good post about this recently. I'm having a hard time finding it now (he posts a lot), so I'll just paraphrase. a lot of (sometimes vile) positions are strongly advocated for by a minority of users, but only weakly opposed by the majority. that vocal minority will upvote any friendly post, while the majority will just shake their heads but not necessarily downvote every single post.
so it's actually quite common for the top comment to be against the aggregate opinion of the userbase.
Edit: Surprised it took almost twenty minutes for the downvotes to start. It also proves my point perfectly. For what it's worth I'm not saying bicycle licenses are good or should be implemented. But it's the most well-understood example of this phenomenon.
This is the argument about why "bicycle licenses" aren't a thing. The number of drivers who aren't cyclists dwarfs the number of cyclists by many orders of magnitude in most US states. In many municipalities, some cyclists regularly break traffic laws and cause (at best) frustration or (at worst) deadly accidents. This leads to drivers-who-aren't-cyclists making the seems-reasonable comment that you should need a license to drive a bike the same way you do for a vehicle.
So let's say a politician supports bicycle license. This isn't enough to get anyone who supports a bike license to vote for them, because it's not a Top Ten issue for anyone on that side. But not only will every cyclist in their district vote against them, they'll campaign and donate to any opponent of that bill. If they even think you support the legislation they're writing checks to your opponent.
I'm not making an argument on bike licenses in particular but I can see a similar effect where a minority percentage of HN feels strongly enough about a given topic that they upvote the articles based on title alone. When an issue is particularly divisive, the odds increase that people feel strongly on both sides so you end up with the #1 posts on two different days expressing diametrically opposed positions, but both very heavily upvoted.
Well, your example also isn’t up to democratic vote. There may be more compelling reasons why bike licenses don’t exist, like how it’s not worth the trade-off of liberty, how it wouldn’t achieve anything, you can already be prosecuted
for causing an accident, the opinion of car owners against cyclists is usually just irrational hate rather than deliberated policy ideals, etc.
It's not that consistent which stances get upvoted. Different stories attract different readers, and comment upvotes depend on the quality of the message as well as the content.
With all this talk about various corporations policing copyright, censoring political content, and whatnot, I think it's only a matter of time until someone makes an anonymous blockchain content aggregator that's impossible to censor.
Then when it becomes the modern equivalent of Usenet/IRC/Napster/PirateBay, people will just shrug and say "don't blame the protocol".
The demand exists and the technology exists, but nobody has put them together yet.
What if it was only a directory of torrents? Not hosting the content itself, but indexing it.
(I've never developed anything with blockchain or torrents, so my apologies if there's a technical reason why this sucks.)
If I understand Pirate Bay and other torrent sites correctly, they don't host any content. They just index what's available P2P.
I'm not sure how large that index would become, but I could imagine chunking the index itself out so that it doesn't take much room on any one user's machine.
The chunking of the index could theoretically be done in such a way that no individual chunk would have any useable information, so no individual user could be accused of linking to illegal content. (I think that's conceivable? Again, not sure.)
(Please note: This is pure hypotheticals. I have zero interest in seeing such a system come about.)
Indexing has always been the easy part. It’s the hosting that’s the real problem.
With hosting, you can either have it centralised so users are anonymised from each other (but it’s easier to take down centralised repositories) or decentralised but where users can see each other (but then it’s easier for copyright holders to go after individuals). You can’t really have it both decentralised and anonymous.
There's no such thing as 'impossible to censor'. It may eb 'hard to censor', perhaps even 'impractical to censor', but a powerful enough government will be able to censor anything it wants. Do your think that, if people started somehow publishing 'bad' stories about the CCP in the bit coin block chain, the CCP wouldn't act to remove that content or censor any acces to the block chain itself?
CPP might be able to ban access to the block chain, or some part of it, but they wouldn't be able to replace it with their own version that was accepted outside China.
A blockchain doesn't make it impossible to censor.
To be honest, I wonder why western governments don't ban cryptocurrencies.
They make tax collection harder and help criminals collect money.
Plus that would be a blow for countries that are investing tons of money in it eg China, which is destroying the rest of the world, economy-wise.
There is the possibility that western governments are already under Chinese influence, I guess, but I wasn't definitely expecting BTC to survive so long.
Especially because governments are not even benefiting from cryptos.
Torrent aggregator sites/discords have small groups of people behind them to arrest or sue. A blockchain would have a large impractical group of people to arrest or sue, it would be like when the RIAA tried to sue Kazaa users.
It’s unclear how this is true. You would still need tools to search the blockchain for the content you’re looking for. Someone would also need to curate and coordinate the format for embedding this information. Anyone involved with either of those steps could be targeted. Those are just off the top of my head. There are likely more holes than that.
It’s not a tech issue. You can target anyone that’s part of a disaggregated network and broadcasts it. That’s true for torrents, TOR nodes, or blockchains.
What happens when someone uploads their illegal porn to the blockchain aggregator and it can't be taken down? It seems like there's a strong need to censor things like video and photo sharing.
What you describe sounds alot like YouTube. 12 years ago, some friends of mine were doing their entire home music playback with a playlist of stolen music uploads. I'd even go as far and claim that YT Music wouldn't exist if people were not trained that YouTube has all the music content they are looking for.
And then there are channels like "Netzkino" who have around a million subscribers and a few thousand full movies online. The claim is all that content is supposedly legal. Well, maybe. But it doesn't look like it...
I would go so far as to say that the reason Pornhub and other tube sites haven't taken problems like child porn and revenge porn seriously is because doing so would undermine the foundation of their business: stolen content.
On the other hand, this might ultimately work in their favor if it has the effect of raising the bridge they've just crossed. If it gets harder host stolen content, Pornhub has to worry less about someone else doing to them what they've done to others now that they are making a switch to paid content.