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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

As far as it goes, collective shout claimed Valve didn't respond to them and that's why they complained to MC visa about it. They even mention how many calls they made to them to get the complaint heard.

So everyone would have to be pretty invested in this show for it to have originated from Valve?

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Which means Collective Shout didn't have any legal weight behind their demands.

Of course - they've never invoked a legal justification. What they seem to be leaning on is basically "we can create bad press about you supporting payments for X", promising headlines like "MasterCard is paying for women to be beaten and raped!" or other sensational nonsense.

They're based out of Australia and so have the Australian porn laws behind them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Illeg...

> Some types of pornography (both real and fictitious) are technically illegal in Australia and if classified would be rated RC and therefore banned in Australia. This includes any pornography depicting violent BDSM, incest, paedophilia, zoophilia, certain extreme fetishes (such as golden showers) and/or indicators of youth (such as wearing a school uniform).

https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/pornography-la...

https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornography-...

Steam already has the ability to block certain countries and regions from buying specific products. IIRC many of the adult games were already banned in the German region for example.

If it was about the laws, at worst Valve could block Australian users from buying adult content and that would be it.

... and if Valve and Itch had blocked content that was illegal in Australia before Collective Shout weaponized the Australian laws, we wouldn't have heard about it beyond it showing up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...

From the Valve rules:

    6. Content that violates the laws of any jurisdiction in which it will be available

1. Everything on your banned list that Steam sells was already banned in Australia (you can tell by looking it up on SteamDB and noticing it has "n/a" for the Australian price e.g. https://steamdb.info/app/2456420/)

2. Collective Shout aren't weaponising Australian laws in this case - those only apply in Australia. At best they could get games banned in Australia by drawing the state censor's attention to them. What Collective Shout did was weaponise American corporations fear of negative publicity by calling them repeatedly and threatening them with negative campaigning, and as a result got games banned in countries they don't live in, over and above the say-so of the people who do live in those countries, and the laws of those countries allowing them to purchase such games.

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