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First, because it is silently implied that all good websites should collect and check the official IDs of all good citizens uploading any data to them (what a great perspective)...

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.

It's a balance. Suppose you add this proof requirement. What happens then? It's not as simple as lots of legitimate amateur content producers facing additional friction. Most will make the explicit decision not to have their legal name and address associated with pornographic content. Others will upload their content anyway, without doing an audit of the different platforms' security postures or being aware of the likelihood of and outcomes from breaches.

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.

So all professional porn already requires identification and age checks. I'm...not convinced it's the end of the world if amateur ones do too. The considerations are the same.

Professional pornstars are the people that are okay being known in public as a pornstar. There are also vast swaths of people who make content, but don't want to be known as "the pornstar" when they show up to their job on Monday.

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.

People appearing in professional porn today are almost by definition those who are most comfortable getting identification and age checks; the ability to maintain anonymity is a key concern for most amateurs. Adding the same verification process to amateur porn is more or less making all porn professional porn, not mildly tweaking the nature of amateur porn. Amateurs would be faced with a choice of 1) effectively going pro, 2) fleeing to a different platform, or 3) exiting porn production altogether. I'm fairly confident that 2) would be the largest proportion of people, closely followed by 3), with 1) a distant third.

There already are professionally produced things with amateurs seeking to maintain anonymity. And yet, documents are signed, checks are written. The paperwork is just kept offline.

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.

I'm not arguing that it's impossible to verify people: it's clearly not. The point is that it will end up being a painful and risky enough process that amateurs will respond by switching to other platforms hosted overseas, outside the reach of law enforcement. This will provide a space where the exact same problem as exists now--commingling of legitimate amateur porn and nonconsensual videos--reproduces itself, except with no tools available to expunge the videos that need to be expunged.

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.

What you’re arguing for can be classified under the “slippery slope fallacy”.

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.

Not all pro porn requires age checks. That made in the US certainly does, but the requirement isnt universal. Nor is the definition of porn. Many european "art" websites (nudes, generally no sex acts) are not pornographic and feel no need to maintain such records. Playboy would probably not be considered "porn" in many jurisdictions, at least in terms of production. What it is when found on your hard drive while sitting in the US is another matter.

You're aware that the vast majority of amateur porn is some person sending some other person nudes, right? You're effectively arguing for everyone should have to provide ID with every "u up??". Let's not make the insane over-enforcing of nudes worse.

Of course not; but if you're a company profiting from it being put online it seems reasonable to expect a level of due diligence.

If you don’t check ID and age, then you are recklessly running the risk of hosting underage pornography and revictimizing minors with every impression.

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.

Wikipedia seems to indicate that the Girls Gone Wild folks survived the lawsuit that you're talking about and were eventually driven out of business due to other legal problems.

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

You are reading into the dates far to much, and they didn’t survive the underage girl criminal and civil cases.

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.

Wouldn't it be simpler to make porn a regulated commodity that only the government, or those it authorises with permits, can produce? Like alcohol. But why stop there? Let's make sex a regulated activity that only the government can approve. This will solve the whole consent problem in the regulated space because every sexual interaction will be pre approved and in writing, with a no harm no foul escape clause if anyone changes their mind.

/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....

The US' current ID and info collection requirements for sexual content exist on very thin and shaky constitutional grounds right now.

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.

Something tells me that the whole record-keeping system was introduced just to protect the studios from troubles. “See, we're legal, shut up and don't get in the way, we're doing business”.

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

I mean that's also true, representatives left to their own devices would come up with something that completely breaks any sense of practicality while still failing to accomplish whatever cause they thought they were addressing.

What's the significant difference? I've seen viral videos of people in compromising or embarrassing situations. Some have even lost their jobs as a result. Should all video uploading sites demand documentation that every person in the video consents to it?

If the law requires it, yes. The uploader should be the liable party if the subject or subjects didn't consent.

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’m not comfortable being liable to being sued because my cousin decided to let us know after the fact he didn’t want to be in any of the pictures uploaded to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/tumblr/Flickr/etc.

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

What if your cousin is doing something frowned upon by society (wearing blackface, spouting racial epithets, etc)? What if it's not frowned upon now, but is at a later date? What if you don't find anything objectionable, but they wouldn't want it shown, and their concerns are borne out later? What if it's completely benign but out of context appears problematic (goofing around with a good friend of a different race and it comes across as something different when only a portion of it is represented)? What if they just have a personal objection to having heir picture posted?

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.

Absolutely. Good UX would be the subject receiving a notification that a photo of them has been uploaded, requesting whether they should be scrubbed/blurred from the photo or not before it’s made public. It’s about consent and agency.

I’d argue the tech to support this would require much more to be known about me by another entity and system than likely any picture taken by someone would share. No thanks.

And all those tourists in the background of your selfie at the Statue of Liberty. Need their permission, too?

If it’s out in public and non commercial, no. If commercial, a release form is required. Assumes US law as-is today.

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

Your link says:

"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.

I suspect there's a bit of nuance there which hasn't been identified here yet. Perhaps to do with whether people are background or immediately identifiable, or and active part of of what's going on. I know consent forms are a part of television recording when talking to people on the street (otherwise they blur faces), but I don't think they bother to get everyone in the background to sign.

I agree with this stance, but I also think it's beneficial to explore whether "there's a significant difference between 'uploading any data' and 'uploading porn'" is true in part or whole, and whether the "porn" part of it is a red-herring.

What about videos of police brutality, etc? How would you go about getting consent from cops to upload it?

If it's public and it's in the public interest (non commercial), I would expect statute to not require approval (see my sibling comment about US photograph release requirements). One would also hope that policy governance agencies would release the video publicly when necessary (as is happening with Chicago's Civilian Office of Police Accountability with the body cam footage from the shooting of an allegedly armed 13 year old in Chicago recently [1]). Chicago requires such materials be made public within 60 days of an incident, although a minor's involvement delayed release of the video in my example.

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

The whole question here is whether the law should require it. The reason why it's a strange concept is that it would severely limit the spread of information. The same avenues that a regular person can get content about them deleted can be used by politicians or criminals to do the same. Not only that, these levers can also be abused to simply target somebody with false claims. Furthermore, it also places trust onto the video hosting website to keep all of that information safe. If they get hacked, then all of that documentation and images of IDs get leaked.

>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.

All systems are open to abuse, which is why it's important to build systems with robust measures to counter abuse. The spread of some information should be limited. Takedowns should be logged and reported on to regulatory bodies to ensure everyone involved is acting in good faith.

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?")

Yes, any normal porn company make performer sign specific contract, it should just be the same for porn sites

How could that even work in practice? Everybody who is visible in a video has to do some kind of VideoIdent and clearly state their consent? YouTube should have to do the same, btw.

Are you saying that movies and porn are done without people consent? Performer on set, people acting as background give theirs explicit on paper consent. So if you are not your average porn company you should just send these contracts to the platform. And BY THE WAY it's already like this in the web caming industry.

The producers sign the contracts with the people they meet in person to make the videos, so they can verify those same people signed the contracts. A web site has no way to check if the contracts are real. People can just upload made up documents.

So you think showing NO proof is better? It's real world we are talking about. The reason backpage and co got busted by the FBI is because of the amount of shady activity. And pornhub is definitely hight on the list of shady sites. Also a lot porn site are just own by porn company so they already have the contracts. Just don't be surprise when you see FBI indictments.

You are probably guided by the false dilemma presented by that or similar articles. I doubt any porn service on the internet in the last 25 years did anything like that, just like no web hosting service has checked that each image and each piece of text on your web site is legally owned or distributed by you. This is by no means a recent problem, naked pictures were leaked intentionally or unintentionally long before internet existed. However, the discussion implies that all of the sudden porn sites appeared, you can be on them, and wegottadosomethingfast!

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?

I don't think there is much difference between your naked body and other information you might want to keep private.

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.

Then there should be no difference in how it is handled, and “porn” is not a wild card to prevent the critical assessment of proposed actions, just like “think of the children” isn't.

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?

Then there should be no difference in how it is handled, and “porn” is not a wild card to prevent the critical assessment of proposed actions, just like “think of the children” isn't.

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.

You’re embarrassing yourself with these posts...

Yeah, I think you're missing the point, which is young women are having their stuff put up online and it's systematically distributed by entities that may very well have the capability to do better.

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.

Is your diatribe an argument that Pornhub should have the right to distribute pictures of a sexual assault?

That's not what he's arguing at all.

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.

The obvious step would be to require the uploader to be responsible for their content. Less so than youtube, ph's content would generally imply that the owner has secured the rights of its participants.

> What a nice manipulative article perfectly targeted at clueless general public.

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

You have this almost exactly backwards- PH now own (or are responsible for) their entire industry because they take all the profit.

That's what I'm talking about: real stories of regular people are cynically used to negotiate new porn profit deals.

It's the law. 18 U.S.C. 2257

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

Well, as your link states, this applies to producers of the 'visual imagery' (i.e. in this case, the woman's husband - but presumably he has a record of her name and age required by this clause, and presumably she's over 18), not all the sites distributing/redistributing user uploaded content.

> So the criminal was her husband

Why do you think this matters?