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>The individual in the film would have to be registered with the gov't and have an existing agreement between themselves and the distributor. I think you're un

>The individual in the film would have to be registered with the gov't and have an existing agreement between themselves and the distributor. I think you're underestimating how much of the internet is porn, and how much you're asking of the average content creator. Maybe you are from a country where porn is illegal? In America, the legal definition of porn is pretty much anything designed to cause sexual excitement. I could make a video of myself walking around in my high heels, and that would count as porn. Getting the government involved before I shared my sexy engineer legs to PornHub/YouTube/Telegram would kill that, and probably also kill the platforms that were made great by enabling that.

jszymborski 6y ago
I'm from Montreal, home of Mindgeek :) IANAL but laws exist in most of the world requiring that individuals in a pornographic video need to be above a certain age. My understanding is that, counter-intuitively, if all one has is the video to go by, the more ambiguous matter is not whether the video is pornographic, but whether the individuals in the video are legally of age. At the very least, that is the framing of this article. Perhaps I'm naive in thinking so, but I don't imagine "entering an agreement" with a distributor to share your content need be more complicated than an OAUTH flow to a gov't website and checking a box. I do get that this can be abused by gov'ts and big tech to force individuals to identify themselves before using major platforms but I have two thoughts on that: 1) You can have a safe-harbor clause, similar to DMCA, where websites that host user content need not register as distributors of pornography if they have a take-down method whereby reported pornographic can be removed. Of course, the DMCA Safe-Harbor clause has its own problems and we'd need need to learn from our mistakes there 2) From a more fundamental perspective and perhaps veering off-topic, reliance on huge centralised platforms of the ilk of FB/Twitter/etc.. will always result in chilling effects and abuses of power. Until that problem is solved, distributors will make their gains at the cost of users. EDIT: Thinking about this some more, obscenity laws have been used for ages to oppress minorities and suppress speech through selective enforcement. The only way something like this would work is through a very narrow definition of pornography, I suppose. Abuse of individuals is far from evident in most cases, particularly from a given video, so naturally individuals would fall through even the widest definitions of obscenity. Only a very narrow definition would make sense here, assuring that speech is not unnecessarily stifled while a narrow category of blatant abuses are disallowed. All this to say, this isn't indeed cut-and-dried, and I regret any comment I've made to make it seem like it is.
- scotty79 6y ago
  I think with such system in place soon every content creator would be required to have OAUTH flow to gov't website before publishing anything. It would help with so many things. Like copyright or fake news. ... ultimately also critiques of policies an the government. After that system is in place its abuses can be endless. I'm usually cautious about slippery slope arguments and tend to trust ultimate effectiveness of the democratic oversight of the government, but this slope looks very steep to me and very slippery.

jszymborski 6y ago

I'm from Montreal, home of Mindgeek :) IANAL but laws exist in most of the world requiring that individuals in a pornographic video need to be above a certain age. My understanding is that, counter-intuitively, if all one has is the video to go by, the more ambiguous matter is not whether the video is pornographic, but whether the individuals in the video are legally of age. At the very least, that is the framing of this article. Perhaps I'm naive in thinking so, but I don't imagine "entering an agreement" with a distributor to share your content need be more complicated than an OAUTH flow to a gov't website and checking a box. I do get that this can be abused by gov'ts and big tech to force individuals to identify themselves before using major platforms but I have two thoughts on that: 1) You can have a safe-harbor clause, similar to DMCA, where websites that host user content need not register as distributors of pornography if they have a take-down method whereby reported pornographic can be removed. Of course, the DMCA Safe-Harbor clause has its own problems and we'd need need to learn from our mistakes there 2) From a more fundamental perspective and perhaps veering off-topic, reliance on huge centralised platforms of the ilk of FB/Twitter/etc.. will always result in chilling effects and abuses of power. Until that problem is solved, distributors will make their gains at the cost of users. EDIT: Thinking about this some more, obscenity laws have been used for ages to oppress minorities and suppress speech through selective enforcement. The only way something like this would work is through a very narrow definition of pornography, I suppose. Abuse of individuals is far from evident in most cases, particularly from a given video, so naturally individuals would fall through even the widest definitions of obscenity. Only a very narrow definition would make sense here, assuring that speech is not unnecessarily stifled while a narrow category of blatant abuses are disallowed. All this to say, this isn't indeed cut-and-dried, and I regret any comment I've made to make it seem like it is.

scotty79 6y ago
I think with such system in place soon every content creator would be required to have OAUTH flow to gov't website before publishing anything. It would help with so many things. Like copyright or fake news. ... ultimately also critiques of policies an the government. After that system is in place its abuses can be endless. I'm usually cautious about slippery slope arguments and tend to trust ultimate effectiveness of the democratic oversight of the government, but this slope looks very steep to me and very slippery.