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.
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.
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.
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.
AFAIK porn performers don't generally get paid residuals, so there probably less interest in this sort of skulduggery.
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.
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.
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.
Thank fuck Ryan Creamer was verified.
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.
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.
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?
Lawyers, plenty of them.
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.
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.
I don't think Pornhub behaves in same way neither YT or more comparable imgur.
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.
It became obvious to big copyright owners that they would get more if they played ball with Google instead of fighting them in court.
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?).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
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.
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.
* 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.)
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.
These were incidents counted by a third party, not self-reported
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canada-internet-chil... There's a useful little graph in the article that shows how the Canadian Centre for Child Protection ranked various sites.
The article mentions it was not Pornhub doing the checking.
Pornhub also required you to have an account to report content if I'm not mistaken.
anecdotal indeed.
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.
[1] - https://favpng.com/png_view/t-shirt-t-shirt-school-uniforms-...
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.
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.
It's not always easy to determine these things.
It wasn't the police they were reported to it was the site admins of XHamster.
>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.
I don’t think so.
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.)
That's mostly why YouTube still exists.
The case with pornhub was exactly the opposite.
On the other hand, there's naked yoga on YouTube so....
I'm not sure how Youtube or Pornhub adds value to the content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By making it available. This is value added too.
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?
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.
Megaupload poked a bigger bear.
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.
[0] - https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
Paid porn doesn't have a strong lobby, so there is no similar pressure on PornHub/MindGeek.
I would, sadly, also not be entirely surprised to find out that the courts are.
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.
> if someone told me they worked for google or some other advertising network, I would silently be judging them for their life choices
Maybe try some introspection.
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.
Claiming that everyone who works at Google works on Ads is like saying everyone who works at Amazon moves boxes in a warehouse.
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.
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.
The problem is that enforcement was very poor.
Sadly, it'll be impossible to stop it entirely with the unverified upload model.
So much so that all videos start to look the same.
Or so I've been told.
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?
Ok.
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.
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.
Probably one of the only ones that actually will be positive in intent.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.