There's a significant difference between "uploading any data" and "uploading porn". Suggesting someone who is uploading porn should have to prove that they're entitled to, and that the people in the video have consented to be put online in the context of a porn video, is not unreasonable given the weight of evidence that "revenge porn" is incredibly damaging to victims.

What happens in a breach? Now, you're probably thinking, just require the platforms to be secure! But you can't simply will that into existence, and I guarantee you it's impossible. So ultimately you've made people vulnerable when they weren't before, and you're setting up a situation where it's pretty much inevitable that they'll be exposed and threatened by stalkers, deranged fans, and ideological zealots.

Let's suppose you bite the bullet, and say turning all the porn platforms into outlets for major porn production companies is the way to go. At least we've eliminated revenge porn, right? No. Large masses of people really hate that kind of mass produced porn, so they jump to foreign platforms that don't require complicated ID verification. These sites end up with the large majority of amateur porn content, along with the revenge porn. But they're now out of the reach of US law enforcement, so the victims of revenge porn would then be in a worse position than they are today.

Now we're getting to even more extreme measures. Maybe the US needs to build a national firewall to prevent the foreign criminals from penetrating our great nation and undermining our morals with porn that's unapproved by the Feds? China is way ahead of the game on this, in that pornography is outright illegal, and it has sophisticated internet security measures that are exceptional in breadth and depth by Western standards. How's its war on porn going? Spoiler alert: it's lost it. Perhaps it could be a moment to build cross-cultural empathy, as Chinese netizens exchange tips with Americans on how to use Shadowsocks to avoid the censors and access amateur porn.

Requiring ID verification is one of those things that sounds good and moral on its face, but has so many unintended downstream consequences that exacerbate the original problem while making things generally worse.

I would imagine it's quite hard to get a job if the top Google result for your name goes to PornHub because all their identification info got leaked.

I think the amateur producers deserve respect for their privacy. Having all your amateur porn tied back to you because of an identification leak is going to screw up your life a lot. I guess the question is, are we willing to risk the privacy of the amateur producers to offer some extra level of protection to revenge porn victims? I say some because there will basically always be sites that don't enforce ID requirements. As long as there's demand for that kind of thing, it will find a way. The war on drugs hasn't eliminated drugs, and I sincerely doubt the war on revenge porn is going to be drastically more successful.

I hate the DMCA, but I'd rather see a DMCA-like process where you can submit a request to take down the video. They can either take it down and avoid liability, or refuse to take it down and accept liability if the complaint turns out to be valid.

Yes, it may make it harder for an amateur seeking to upload something they filmed themselves, and who are not looking to build a brand or collect a payment for it. Not sure how many of those there are. But as soon as you're looking to do one of those things, there are existing allegories you can look to to figure out how it might be enabled.

Every proactive approach has this downside. That's why we should focus more on making it easy for victims to report a video and have it and variations of it removed from all sites nearly immediately, as well as making sure laws are on the books making it easy to prosecute offenders.

We have repeatedly seen that, while deplatforming does drive content creators to move to other platforms, these platforms will not have the same reach as the mainstream ones. I.e. it’s not a perfect remedy but it’s quite effective.

If anyone recalls the old “Girls Gone Wild” days where they sold videos/dvds via late night info commercials there was a very famous criminal case and civil lawsuit that put them out of business because they filmed underage girls who produced fake identification...while most crimes require intent and the fake ID would generally have made it possible to prove intent, underage sex/pornography is a strict liability crime so if it happens it’s criminal regardless of intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Gone_Wild_(franchise)#Le...

Subsequent to those underage cases which began in 2003 additional civil lawsuits were also brought against the company for other issues, but those underage cases were still ongoing.

A different example would be the Hogan/Gawker case which started in 2013. The company faced other lawsuits after, but it was the hogan case that pushed them into bankruptcy because it didn’t end until 2016.

/S

But seriously, there's problems. if you want to ID people it might be easier to make every video begin with the actors holding up a placard that's like an anonymous crypto QR token clapper that somehow only government sensors can officially check, that's like a hash of their face id, and it's all in a big government bloom filter for registered porn stars. But then you couldn't stop people prefixing an unapproved video with their identities... Maybe the tech angle of not the right way to deal with this....

They've never had a criminal indictment, had very limited enforcement solely due to the predictable constitutional challenge, which occurred anyway.

Simply put, dragnets against all producers to create a criminal neither solves the problem, deters the problem, nor catches the actual criminal.

All you have now is an awkward duty to give anybody with a camera your drivers license or passport. Or did we ever actually think about the people that appear in the videos. And in this thread's suggestion: having them upload it to random websites. Fantastic.

And still, most people don't realize what “MET” in “MET-Art” stood for.

Why is this a strange concept? Why should someone be able to upload whatever they want to platforms with no responsibility for what they’re uploading?

I admittedly didn’t read the article, so maybe your comment’s sentiment isn’t meant to include these scenarios.

There are many reasons why it's a good idea to at least check that the person is comfortable with it. You shouldn't be liable if they've said it's okay.

https://www.format.com/magazine/resources/photography/photo-...

"If someone is in a public space, like a park, beach, or sidewalk, it is legal to photograph them. They shouldn’t expect privacy laws to prevent them from being photographed. That means a street photographer can publish candids taken in public spaces, as long as those images are only being used for editorial purposes."

It'd be impossible to photograph a protest, rally, sporting event, or basically any long shot of a public area if you had to get individual consent from every person in the frame.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/04/05/adam-t...

>Why should someone be able to upload whatever they want to platforms with no responsibility for what they’re uploading?

This isn't in question though. The question is whether sites need to be preemptive or reactive. Illegal content is illegal even right now and these websites will delete it. If they don't then you can take them to court and the content will get deleted. However, the thread suggests that these websites should be forced to be preemptive - to demand documentation upfront. That's a whole different situation.

With regards to video hosting websites maintaining identification information, it's possible to provide this functionality without they themselves storing sensitive user identification data. Third party providers (ID.me comes to mind) could be utilized to do so, with adult content hosting providers treating this data similar to payment data and the PCI requirements that go along with it (store the verification/attestation token and timestamps, not the data itself). I would agree that I wouldn't want Pornhub storing my passport photo and metadata.

Finally, to your point about preemptive vs reactive, in the case of adult content platforms, it seems reasonable to require preemptive documentation considering the record keeping requirements for producing adult content. Refer to 18 U.S. Code § 2257 for specifics [1] [2].

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2257

[2] https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/adult (Control-F "Who is required to keep records about adult images under federal law?")

I don't think there is much difference between your naked body and other information you might want to keep private. “Porn” triggers people (most often American people, I have to admit as a distant observer), makes them reason like there is some inherent difference between “porn” and “not porn”, and makes manipulation easier. Basically, what you're saying is that there should be more (indirect) censorship and real-life identity matching on the Web — but it's for an Obvious Good Cause! The problem is that Good Causes get forgotten quite fast, and the one who benefits from it is the entity in control of the system that gained power. Here we have porn studios dictating previously independent Mindgeek (former pain in their asses) which content should be on the biggest porn streaming sites under new system. The speed and scale of the attack, and the concerned voices from various directions, hint there was a lot of high-level lobbying involved.

Here's no less thrilling example. Suppose that Rick Astley wakes up tomorrow and decides to point out that he has always been a singer and not some kind of internet joke. Perfectly understandable impulse. Then he proceeds to remove all the non-musical uses of his songs (let's forget about corporate ownership). How would you react to that? What would results be? There's certainly more people with similar wishes — basically the whole genre of “viral videos” is one big zero consent heap. When you are having a laugh at someone's expense, do you worry about them? When you watch videos of Beirut explosion, do you think about all the dead people who never gave consent for their last moment to be your entertainment? Should we ban the uploading of such videos without explicit source checks, then?

Absolutely. Swap "porn" for "credit card details" and the point I made is still true. There are some things that people don't want to be shared online and they should be in a position to stop that happening.

One individual's right to privacy is more important than another individual's freedom of expression except in very limited circumstances of the public interest. Reporting news should happen even without consent from the people the news is about because it's good for society to be able to share that information. Uploading porn or a prank video should not happen without consent from all parties.

As for your example of Rick Astley - the law already enables him to do that if he wanted to. There are many legal mechanisms for copyright holders to revoke access to their material.

There doesn't have to be one simple rule that covers everything. We're intelligent human beings. We can have a bit of nuance without society collapsing.

I suppose that some legal options are available to Rick Astley and other people whose name are hardly well known. But can they realistically do anything with it apart from causing another Streisand effect? Who is to blame for that, who is going to pay billions of dollars? YouTube? 4chan? Tim Berners-Lee?

The reason we're discussing porn is because that's what the article is about. The point that people should be prevented from sharing things that they don't have permission to share (unless it's in the public interest for it to be shared) is an obvious one and mostly how the law works already.

One more very important thing to remember here is that the woman in the article was the victim of a crime and the video in question is of that crime taking place. It's not 'simply' porn. It's a video of a sexual assault, and the victim is the one suffering because it's on the internet. Arguing that it should be allowed to stay on the web is arguing that the victim of a crime should continue to suffer forever. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, etc have never covered criminal acts.

That's a legit story.

Edit: We're talking about a story for the masses here, nuances are important, but I don't think most people really fathom that this is a common thing.

What happened to this woman is awful and her ex-husband should go to jail. I also think everyone agrees pornhub and other sites should be forced to remove this content.

He is making the argument that including a drivers license and signed agreement with every piece of nude media is not a good solution.

This could describe approximately 100% of local news articles/segments on any topic even remotely political or controversial. And maybe 75% of the remaining.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/18-usc-2257-2257a-cert...

Why do you think this matters?