Pornhub: Judge rules Visa can be sued in abuse claim
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
That said, I really don’t want the payment processor involved in a case like this.
There’s a bigger issue at stake, and that is private companies legislating morality. We’ve allowed Visa to be a monopoly and that is a hard hard thing to undo. If we actually had choices besides Visa, I wouldn’t care, but alas, they are a monopoly and we’ve done nothing about them.
Nestlé can be located anywhere for all I care, but it's not relevent to the discussion since they rely on American resources (and American manufacturing/processing plants, for that matter).
They have no morals other than the dollar and maybe my glasses are rose colored but that sounds like a pretty damn simple, predictable and equitable way to run a business.
They opened themselves up to this line of legal reasoning.
The only real issue is wether they knew that Pornhub had child porn.
Now if Visa said it’s technically impossible to ban someone, Gab could be used to prove that it is
Putting themselves in the morals & enforcement business, it was only a matter of time before they were held to account for not doing a better job of it. A much stickier situation in front of a jury than being able to honestly state, "Hey, we just process payments."
This was one of the problems cryptocurrencies were invented to solve. It shouldn't be up to Visa whether to cut off funding to anyone in particular.
Visa states openly that they weren’t aware of the situation at issue, don’t support child pornography, and have taken steps to avoid supporting it. This isn’t a case of cutting off some “industry”; child pornography is already widely and rightly maligned.
... it's a failure. Maybe it blows up in the future... maybe.
Cryptocurrency doesn't solve this, nor was it really invented to address this issue. Decentralization is a nice side-effect of a low-trust network, but it also completely sabotages any moderation efforts on the platform, and preserves an entire population's porn habits in an openly-availible, transparent ledger. I don't think your average Pornhub visitor will be terribly excited to adopt this radical new technology since it presents a scenario where their purchases could be completely deanonymized.
> It shouldn't be up to Visa whether to cut off funding to anyone in particular.
It's not. Chase Bank or Mastercard are welcome to jump in and take Visa's place if they think the platform is a safe place to make money. It sounds like this is more of a Pornhub issue than a Visa one though, so I wouldn't expect it to get fixed very soon.
They are. If you're a banker, you effectively choose which direction society evolves towards by choosing who gets banking services and especially access to credit. Deny someone banking and credit and they're pretty much done. That's way too much power.
> it also completely sabotages any moderation efforts on the platform
"Moderation" is the job of law enforcement.
> preserves an entire population's porn habits in an openly-availible, transparent ledger
Which is why people should choose privacy cryptocurrency like Monero.
That's why we have fair lending laws. If you're denied private services with a bank on the basis of a protected characteristic, you can take them to court. Deny someone banking and credit, and you get sent to jail. I don't know where you're citing some of this stuff, but some sources might be nice.
> "Moderation" is the job of law enforcement.
That would be a completely new precedent to me and the United States of America. As a platform runner, you are responsible for the data that you host. You can't just make a social media site, have a bunch of people post gore on it, and then tell the judge "but they did it, not me!". They're going to chuckle, force you to testify that you stored the illegal content on your own server, and then lock you up for as long as they'd like.
This has happened many times in the past. Platform owners are not exempt from moderating their own platform. Even 4chan needs moderators, or else they too would get shut down.
> Which is why people should choose privacy cryptocurrency like
So... you're saying that the average person, who fears things like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks, is going to start using the premier currency for human trafficking and the drug trade? No, I don't think they will. My radical prediction is that people will continue to buy porn the same way they have for the past 30 years, because none of the boons of cryptocurrency directly benefit them.
Sex industry is an example. They are frequently cut off by banks and payment processors even when their works feature no actual humans whatsoever. Every now and then I see a thread here about something like that. If I remember correctly, Patreon had trouble with money flow at some point and threatened to censor content.
> As a platform runner, you are responsible for the data that you host. You can't just make a social media site, have a bunch of people post gore on it, and then tell the judge "but they did it, not me!". They're going to chuckle, force you to testify that you stored the illegal content on your own server, and then lock you up for as long as they'd like.
That makes no sense to me. Aren't there safe harbor laws which exempt you from the consequences of your user's actions if you comply with law enforcement? Someone shares a malware github here on HN and the whole site gets prosecuted?
And since when is gore illegal? Obviously if someone creates a snuff film that person will be investigated and hopefully prosecuted for murder, but I don't think it's actually illegal to view that stuff. I remember discussions about sites literally dedicated to gore on this very site around the time liveleak shut down.
If anything, that's yet another example of private corporations legislating morality. Advertisers will cut you off if they think you're offensive. I remember several cases of web sites self-censoring after Google pulled their ads.
> Even 4chan needs moderators, or else they too would get shut down.
4chan complies with law enforcement. I've read transcripts of the former administrator testifying in court. As far as I know, it was never held directly responsible for anything its users did there.
You can moderate by watching the flow of goods instead of money.
One case would be ransomware attacks, another case can be content out of reach from the jurisdiction(for example, at one point Russia might choose to host copyrighted or other no bueno materials).
With the case of PornHub, the victim apparently reached them but it took PH weeks to remove the offending materials. Maybe, if that industry or that company cannot be forced to act appropriately before an irreversible damage is done it can make sense to go after their enablers like Visa.
It could be reasonable to require payment processors to have a fast channel to report abuse. PH would have noticed the problem much quicker, had Visa cut them off from collecting payments.
I think the issue is that Visa should not be tasked with enforcing the law. In my opinion, in an ideal world, PornHub should be forced to verify its content not by Visa, but by the government, i.e. there will be heavy fine for allowing illegal materials to be uploaded.
I don't think this is a good analogy as Visa does operations and it's quite reasonable to require safety during operations.
> PornHub should be forced to verify its content not by Visa, but by the government
The problem with this is, which government? We don't have a world government or harmonised regulations but we have an international network.
Are you saying that a payment processor should not be held liable if they had knowledge of the illegal content, and actively decided to profit from it, or are you saying that you do not believe they actually did that? Because only the first point was at issue in this decision.
I highly highly doubt that Visa had any knowledge in this. PornHub may be a big company but they have to be minuscule for a company like Visa.
I really don't want this to turn into a case where payment companies are reluctant to do anything that is mildly controversial and could be turned against them at a later point. Think Pot (which I know many don't do right now thanks to federal laws but hopefully that changes soon), alcohol, other legal adult services, etc etc.
This just feels like the steps towards a more puritanical America. One that looks at sex, porn, and similar things as immoral and "dirty".
Also why Visa? Are they going to go after the bank(s?) that PornHub used to store their money? The banks that customers used when making the payments? The datacenter(s) they used? The ISP that carried the data around?
PornHub? Yes that makes sense. But anything past them just feels like it's grasping at straws.
And in doing so, ensuring that such things are relegated to the shadows instead of being regulated in broad daylight and preventing such harms from taking place.
Not only lack of regulation but also in places that make it even harder to hold people accountable (increased anonymity).
The flower, vegetable, and mushroom farms near me don't have to deal with that. The farm that grows baby Marijuana plants has to hold a bunch of cash and gets robbed. This is California, so it's all theoretically legal, but it's not equal.
Don't want to get robbed? Don't grow drugs. Don't want to have your naked photos/videos posted on the internet? Don't have sex before you're an adult. Or not married, or whatever.
Sure it's the de facto state of things, but when conservatives don't like things they tend to do so outright, e.g. the recent Supreme Court ruling.
Plus is it really policy keeping Visa away from these trades? Or internal forces withing Visa?
Going to disagree with you on that one:
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-endi...
But I would think to win sueing someone you have to show intent. If visa cut off ties when new evidence was presented I would think that would show a lack of intent?
In this case the plaintiff has to show knowledge, but showing is a later stage of the case. The decision here was only over whether a valid claim was stated.
Specifically cited in the decision (along with Pornhub purging of the vast majority of it's content in direct response to that suspension) as showing that Visa had the power to affect Pornhub content (since Visa had apparently argued that lack of such power as a reason they should not be liable even if they had knowledge.)
Visa will then be able to sue Pornhub to pay its share. In theory, everybody will pay the amount they were supposed to, but the victim will get the money sooner by sending the bill to the party with the deepest pockets.
But often, the parties most at fault go out of business, so the party with the deepest pockets pays the whole judgement and the people who actually caused the injury escape punishment.
This has already been happening. Look at GoFundMe and Patreon.
Why?
> I highly highly doubt that Visa had any knowledge in this.
So? Whether it's likely to be true was not an issue at this stage. The question was only whether the plaintiff had made an argument which, if proven true by evidence at trial, would constitute a violation of the law for which a remedy is avaialable against Visa. Because the court found answer was yes—because, among other things, they alleged that Visa did have such knowledge—the case can proceed to where the plaintiff gets a chance to present evidence to prove the allegations and Visa gets to try to rebut them, with evidence on both sides.
Would you prefer that someone in this position, making this allegation, be denied a remedy without the opportunity to prove their case?
In this case Visa was providing a service with little to no knowledge of the internal workings of PornHub.
Like I originally said. Would you still be saying this if they were attempting to sue the banks? The datacenters? The ISPs? The manufactures of the machines in the datacenter? If visa is liable for this so are all of those which does not make any sense.
They are already suing pornhub in this case. I don't see the value or reasoning that Visa has any liability here.
To me her getting a financial remedy quicker is not a valid reason to sue a different party.
Why should their level of knowledge of the internal workings of MindGeek be relevant, if they had knowledge of and actively chose to profit from the illegal activity at issue?
> Would you still be saying this if they were attempting to sue the banks? The datacenters? The ISPs? The manufactures of the machines in the datacenter?
Yes, I would say the same. Whether they can prove the requisite level of knowledge is an issue for trial, but they have certainly stated a claim that is sufficient, and would be sufficient mutatis mutandis against any of the others.
> If visa is liable for this so are all of those which does not make any sense.
No, Visa having actual knowledge of the illegal conduct and actively choosing to profit from it does not imply that all of those had the same knowledge and made the same choice. And, again, this isn't a decision that Visa is liable, but that the plaintiff has stated a claim under which Visa would be liable if the claim is proven, and part of proving that is proving Visa’s knowledge.
> They are already suing pornhub in this case. I don't see the value or reasoning that Visa has any liability here.
Whether either has liability is yet to be determined; this isn't a decision on liability but on whether the allegations made by the plaintiff if proven—which include Visa’s actual knowledge and active decision to profit from MindGeek’s distribution of illegal content—would constitute a violation of the law for which a remedy is available against the defendants.
> To me her getting a financial remedy quicker is not a valid reason to sue a different party.
Not sure why this strawman is raised here.
I don't see Visa as culpable here. And yes, you're right—no more culpable than the ISP serving PornHub, or their analytics provider, data center, ad services, or anything else. The blame lies squarely on PornHub. And there are surely other institutions than Visa that should be obliged to take immediate serious issue with CSAM on PH.
Why isn't Visa being forced to stop providing payment processing services for Liquor stores that sell alcohol to people who drive drunk and injure themselves and others? It's not a strawman—I see Visa as removed from culpability in that case as they are in this PornHub case.
The specific behavior of the person posting this content is unquestionably damnable, but it doesn't mean PornHub is a whole is a net-bad. Sex work is real work, and America has a real damn hard time appreciating the aesthetics of the human body in a comfortable and unproblematic manner, and the pressure to keep PornHub surpassed in the shadows is also what promotes some bad behavior—since we can't talk about sex comfortably as a culture.
In any case, Visa's job is not to moderate the content of the internet or any other purchases on their platform, aside from an interested best-effort response to deny outright the sale of illegal goods and services. Visa should be able to fine or sue PornHub for breach of contract. Or increase their payment processing fees, and make them provide reports and transparency from this. It is not ok for Visa to feel forced by external pressure to cut off this business category as a whole. Sure, charge them more, but don't deny the business.
Child porn is very illegal, but the people who provide utilities to people who commit crimes should not be held responsible. There are thousands of people and businesses who "made money" off this, from the electric company, to the US government, to the Starbucks barista who got a tip from a worker.
The credit card duopoly is designed for regulatory capture, and it's a huge problem.
> MindGeek told the BBC that at this point in the case, the court has not yet ruled on the truth of the allegations, and is required to assume all of the plaintiff's allegations are true and accurate.
With that context it doesn't seem too unusual, as "you can sue most anyone for most anything" is the norm.
Mindgeek should definitely be liable, but this is classic "lawyers looking for deep pockets". Why not also have the company that made the camera that recorded the video be liable? Why not the ISP that served the content? Heck, should the Federal Reserve be liable for a crime every time someone pays in cash?
https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...
Whilst the details of what happened are terrible, surely the buck has to stop at MG? Otherwise we enter the whole gun/car manufacturers argument.
It’s not a payment providers job to police user uploads, there are other laws regulating that already.
And if going after visa, surely Mastercard and Amex etc should be on the cards?
Because every transaction will then be processed by some big company. And if they see a risk in that kind of transaction then they will of course deny it due to legal risks.
And then we are speaking whether a newspaper may be bought because the opinions expressed in that paper could bear the risk that somebody is going to sue them.
Welcome Dystopia.
Substitute YouPorn by some shady dark web childporn website, and having Visa accept to serve them makes them accomplice. Substitute with Amazon and this is slightly harder to wager for some reason. I think there's a greyscale limit between both, and PornHub is not too far from it since there is a fair expectation of getting illicit content, and remuneration from it. It's not ridiculous for a payment processor to be in that lawsuit, to understand if the checks and balances they should exert on their customers' business should be higher (my personal opinion is no, but I see that this should be adjudicated)
Visa and the American internet ad companies on the other hand are still happily sitting on all that money generated, and stubbornly refuse to let go of it.
So yeah, sue the hell out of Visa and those ad companies.
0 - https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/culture-...
Is there any mention of porn in the US constitution at all?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
From that wikipedia page:
—-
The Miller test was developed in the 1973 case Miller v. California.[3] It has three parts:
Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions[4] specifically defined by applicable state law,
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions are satisfied. (this sentence has “citation needed” though)
—-
I don’t think regular porn fits there, but yeah I am not a lawyer
edit: reading more about that case, it was actually directly about porn, and the decision was directly used against porn producers.
Some philosophers have also suggested that even if there are good reasons for protecting the availability of porn, it may not count as speech from the POV of the philosophy of rights - it is simply too unlike other forms of speech to count. I think their arguments are at least worth considering.
[0] https://gould.usc.edu/students/journals/rlsj/issues/assets/d...
> If true equality between male and female persons is to be achieved, we cannot ignore the threat to equality resulting from exposure to materials portraying women as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse.
So exposure to this stuff is a "threat" which I presume they intend to combat. The implication being what people are allowed to expose themselves to is supposed to be regulated. This is advocating for censorship and I will never agree with that on principle.
I kept reading that document and saw several insinuations that pornography causes a lot of things, including rape and violence against women. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Sounds a lot like so many similar claims like video games cause violence and school shootings or rap music causes violence.
As for the evidence, I checked many of the references cited and I saw lots of quotes from what looks like books on the subject. Not that much better than the opinions being posted on this thread. Is there an actual peer reviewed academic study showing a causal relationship between pornography consumption and violence against women? If there is, I have to know because I know lots of people who need to see evidence like that, especially in the medical community. If there isn't, this is merely ideological indoctrination as evidenced by their own citations:
> There seems to be a growing willingness of judges to write about the history of sexism and discrimination against women
> Once judges are sensitized to issues of subordination, power and privilege, they can include those ideas in their written opinions and legal reasoning.
So judges are being "sensitized" to these issues? It seems to me that nobody would need to be "sensitized" to the issue if actual evidence existed.
The author of the piece you cite seems to imagine a giant, previously unrecognized, exception to the First Amendment allowing more extensive regulation of private communication, grounded ultimately in... a case adjudicating the limits of the federal government’s ability to dictate state-government employee benefit decisions under the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
Thanks to the colorful cast of characters involved in Trump’s election-related litigation it is not the single most bizarre legal theory I’ve ever seen from a licensed attorney, but...
Yes, but isn't this case in particular happening because of harm/abuse?
It's pretty evident there are no social conservatives left in the Democrat party anymore, and 2 decades ago it was still large enough that Obama came out against gay marriage while campaigning.
This is really just suing everyone to see what sticks, no way that this goes anywhere... right?
For this case, it is kind of common sense that at some point child porn or at least revenge porn would be uploaded to PH, and they are a very large company that works with Visa, so maybe Visa should have known it was possible? I guess that goes with every company that does business with PH.
There has to be a line somewhere where a company starts being responsible for knowingly doing business with an entity doing illegal things, this lawsuit it maybe just testing that line.
Visa should have known the risk of screwdrivers without background checks! Why didn’t they cut off Home Depot?
Nah, I think you got the point. With social media and user-generated content at whole, it's simply not possible to not have some foul eggs in the basket.
>There has to be a line somewhere where a company starts being responsible for knowingly doing business with an entity doing illegal things
Isn't that the point of business licensing? It is weird for the state, courts, and law enforcement to permit a company to operate legally, but hold their business partners to a higher standard.
Visa didn't have any inside info on pornhub that the state and law enforcement didn't have inside
Does this look different than other porn?
I mean, how is PH supposed to know it's revenge porn, when it's being uploaded? I don't think you can effectively find and filter that. You can only react to complaints afterwards.
Electric utilities, by law, must provide service to everyone (who has the ability to pay).
Money goes to PH via Visa. This allows them to operate.
If the catering company, real estate company, or electric utility is serving as a front to process payments for PH, then they can be sued as well.
Why do you think Visa should be left off the hook if it conspired with PH to profit from CP?
who did what now?
The question should be quite simple. Was Ph licensed to operate legally and does Visa have any inside information that isn't available to the state and legislators.
not clear to me: what is pornhub doing? and what’s the problem with helping them out?
So, while I think your stance is wrong for many reasons, this is misrepresenting what is happening and it a flat out lie.
As it currently stands, the credit card service company is not being held responsible.
It is allowed to be sued, but proof still needs to be produced. But here, let's take your analogy and add in some additional information.
"You stab someone with a screwdriver, paid with a credit card and credit card service company is held responsible. The credit card company worked with the company to ensure that the company could sell illegal screwdrivers to people who would go around stabbing people with it, and promising that they would continue processing transactions as long as they made some promise to do better."
Maybe you can explain why this is okay.
> This is the end of the world as we know it.
It's not.
this is not what was happening at all.
If you can't explain how this is different from the domain name registrar, the datacenter, and even the power and water companies serving the datacenter, then this would allow future lawsuits against these parts that most of us take for granted as a dumb pipe.
Instead of being an automated process essentially to sign up for these services, you will have to interview and provide key parts of your business to each of these, so they can decide if you're worth the risk. And if you allow user uploaded content at all, good luck in this future.
>This is the end of the world as we know it.
These sites are already only allowed to exists with processor fees over 20%. If an alternative, easy, payment platform isn't established (and one hasn't been for decades) these sites and any others deemed 'risky' will cease to exists, and the bar will steadily be raised from there.