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Pornhub: Judge rules Visa can be sued in abuse claim

71 points by mikece 4y ago

Abid_ali 4y ago
[dead]
wiradikusuma 4y ago
Ah, now I understand why payment processors are not so friendly with porn, to avoid collateral damage.
exabrial 4y ago
PH and the people that work there are a 1000% liable for this person’s abuse. Publishing sensitive content without verifying the supply chain is a risky move, and they eventually got caught. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  Isn’t the fact they aren’t a monopoly what gets them to change? Bill Ackman was on CNBC this morning ripping into them for like 15 minutes of prime air time on this issue. The CEO of Visa is nowhere to be heard from. I suspect the end result will be to revoke PH as a customer. Why? Because Mastercard and Amex exist
  - xwowsersx 4y ago
    Sounds like Bill Ackman has a short on Visa.
    - enos_feedler 4y ago
      It would sound that way, which is why CNBC made him clear up any conflicts on air. He said he currently has 7 total long positions and zero shorts and no plans to enter anything with Visa. He was stretching to find a connection with Visa and the best he came up with is that Lowes accepts visa cards
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Ah yes American supply chain responsibility following the great American institutions like Nestle, Johnson and Johnson, Amazon, and my personal favorite the United Fruit Company.
  - stephencanon 4y ago
    Nestle is Swiss.
  - Jugurtha 4y ago
    Nitpicking: Nestlé is Swiss.
    - hmYesok 4y ago
      - Jugurtha 4y ago
        Nestlé France's employees are mostly French, too, as is the case with most multinationals.
        hmYesok 4y ago
        Just a bunch of vain apes pretending their memorization of details of paperwork were the point of the original comment calling out application of agency Legally owned by some dumb apes in Switzerland, still act like typical indifferent human assholes to the rest of the species with their monopolization of resources Real human acts getting hidden and buried by political correctness. Stop with the stupid indirection
        dang 4y ago
        Could you please stop creating accounts that break the site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - 4y ago
- georgia_peach 4y ago
  Visa cut off Gab.com, on their own initiative, for incidentally carrying posts by the Pittsburgh shooter. Why didn't they exercise the same judgement against PornHub for incidentally carrying vids of child sexploitation? They opened themselves up to this line of legal reasoning.
  - Miner49er 4y ago
    They did. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-ending-pornhub-payment-processing-unlawful-videos https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-endi...
    - jessaustin 4y ago
      TFA is about events in 2014. If anything, putting a stop to such things six years later makes them look more guilty.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Why haven’t they exercised the same judgment against Google for YouTube hosting abuse or Google Search indexing abuse?
    - georgia_peach 4y ago
      Money, probably.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Risk-reward... that's the only thing banks care about
  - tiahura 4y ago
    That’s not a legal argument for liability. As a private company they’re perfectly free to pick who they do and don’t do business with. They just can’t do business with criminals engaged in criminality. 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
- throwawaymanbot 4y ago
- jffry 4y ago
  VISA was trying to have themselves removed from the lawsuit before trial even happens, but this ruling is where the judge lays out why the plaintiff has both standing and a possible cause of action against them and therefore why they must be included in the lawsuit.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > private companies legislating morality 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.
  - dizzant 4y ago
    Are you defending the position that as a society, we should continue to allow funding the creation of child pornography through means of crypto? 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.
    - mbg721 4y ago
      Of course not, child pornography is strictly within the domain of public schools, until those pesky parents infiltrate the boards.
    - georgia_peach 4y ago
      Can't speak for matheusmoreira, but I think Visa should handle payments & law enforcement should handle diddlers. Turning payment processors into an extra-judicial enforcement system on top of the existing one is a mess in so many different ways (jurisdiction, lack of due process, arbitrary enforcement, financial motives, conflict of interest, lack of transparency, etc...).
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      I'm saying it's the police's job to go out there, investigate and arrest child molesters, not some payment technology's. Money companies turning into extra-judicial law enforcement by means of risk assessment is how you get bullshit like PayPal's constant freezing of accounts.
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    Too bad they have utterly failed at their stated purpose
- mrtksn 4y ago
  I agree but I think there's a caveat. I think it is possible to have situations where it is really hard to corner the offenders and it makes sense to go after the enablers. 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.
  - SCLeo 4y ago
    Should the manufacturer of the camera be held responsible because they did not verify the purpose of the buyer and consequently allowing them to produce illegal material? (They could technically have some online DRM installed to all of their cameras and if it is reported that someone is making illegal material, they can brick those cameras in question.) 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.
    - mrtksn 4y ago
      > Should the manufacturer of the camera be held responsible because they did not verify the purpose of the buyer and consequently allowing them to produce illegal material? 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.
- cyan5 4y ago
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > That said, I really don’t want the payment processor involved in a case like this. 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tyiz 4y ago
You stab someone with a screwdriver, paid with a credit card and credit card service company is held responsible. This is the end of the world as we know it.
- Aachen 4y ago
  That is what it sounds like honestly, as if the payment provider has to go check on available security footage what the screwdriver was used for (in this case, they could have checked on the site and, potentially, by having their employees look at a lot of porn, found an instance of child porn somewhere) and then discontinue providing services to the store until they put background checks in place for customers. A lot more reasonable for porn than for screwdrivers, but to sue a party so far removed from the person who actually uploaded that child porn and is ultimately the main responsible party... then you can also sue the hosting company, the company that opened up the street to put in cables to transmit the child porn (they could have checked what it's used for), the ISP that was used to access it, et cetera This is really just suing everyone to see what sticks, no way that this goes anywhere... right?
  - Miner49er 4y ago
    I can see there being a bar where it is reasonable that Visa should have known it was happening. For the screwdriver example, I think everyone would agree it would be unreasonable for Visa to know what was going to happen. 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.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      We know at least some screwdrivers (and other hand tools) are used for murder, based on records of murder by the government. Visa should have known the risk of screwdrivers without background checks! Why didn’t they cut off Home Depot?
violet5 4y ago
cromulent 4y ago
The recent FT podcast Hot Money went into some detail about how much control the payment card companies have over the porn industry. https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3244 https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...
vageli 4y ago
This seems to be a pre-trial motion where the plaintiff's allegations are assumed to be true. > 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Point is, even if everything they allege is true, I still think it's ludicrous that the payment processor could be held liable. 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?
  - vageli 4y ago
    As the judge put it, a case could potentially be made that Visa knowingly provided the tools to MindGeek while aware of the child exploitation issues and could potentially be complicit. That potential means the case should proceed and be heard on its merits (at least as I understand it).
snoopen 4y ago
Seems like this misuse of the legal system would be a good way for a judge with bias against porn to drastically destabilise the industry. I'm not at all surprised tho considering it's a US court.
dfxm12 4y ago
The judge in this case was appointed by a Republican president. Republicans have recently started to come out against porn [0]. Legislating porn away would be drastically unpopular (and ostensibly unconstitutional), but of course, judges are appointed undemocratically and thus are above having to answer to voters, so using judges to attack big porn sites' income seems like the strategy they're going with. 0 - https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/culture-war-throwback-republicans-eye-porn-restrictions-rcna31640 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/culture-...
- istinetz 4y ago
  Why would it be unconstitutional? Is there any mention of porn in the US constitution at all?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    Motion pictures aren't mentioned in the Constitution, but most would consider censoring movies to be a violation of free speech. Do you think because the Constitution doesn't specifically mention motion pictures, government should be able to directly or indirectly control what you watch?
  - CGamesPlay 4y ago
    Porn is a form of speech, and speech is protected by the constitution.
    - shp0ngle 4y ago
      There are existing obscenity laws that are constitutional. Not all speech is allowed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test 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.
mikece 4y ago
While it's not clear from the article, if it can be shown that PH didn't act in a manner adequate to defend the plaintiff and an appeal was made to Visa to censure PH for not removing felonious material from their website -- material from which Visa themselves were making money -- then it stands to reason that Visa can be sued as a conspirator. I am not a lawyer but it might be against the law for Visa to have anything to do with the funding of child porn; if they were notified and didn't act sufficiently against PH I can see where there would be more than enough cause for a legal complaint.
bennyp101 4y ago
This seems a very slippery slope. 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?
- tiahura 4y ago
  It sure would suck if companies were pressured to be socially responsible.
nerdjon 4y ago
I feel for this woman, But I don't like where this is going. 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.
- RajT88 4y ago
  > This just feels like the steps towards a more puritanical America. One that looks at sex, porn, and similar things as immoral and "dirty". 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.
  - nerdjon 4y ago
    I did not even think of that! Not only lack of regulation but also in places that make it even harder to hold people accountable (increased anonymity).
  - truffdog 4y ago
    Being forced into the cash economy means being victimized by crime. 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.
    - RajT88 4y ago
lizardactivist 4y ago
Pornhub did the best they could and removed the videos as soon as they had knowledge of them, and the subsequent re-uploads. They never once argued or ignored her requests. 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.
- 5atlanta 4y ago
m000 4y ago
This gives more ground to VISA et al. to not want to touch anything sex-related with a ten-foot pole. The big losers here are the legit sex workers who are already having trouble receiving payment for their product.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mchusma 4y ago
I hate the visa/Mastercard duolopy and the way people attempt to use the networks to regulate things. Card networks should be an open carrier to all, not subject to political whims. It's just too dangerous to have payments anything other than a utility. 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.
sazz 4y ago
This should definitely be a warning sign for everybody who votes for cashless transactions in the future. 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.
charles_f 4y ago
I get the general sensation that it doesn't make sense to hold Visa responsible for something that sounds more of a pornhub issue, but the way I read this: it's just a pre-trial to look into Visa's request to be removed from the trial itself. They haven't been condemned. The judge's justification is that they were part of the financial transaction (albeit through advertising), and therefore there is a chance they could have a say. 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)

71 points by mikece 4y ago

Abid_ali 4y ago

[dead]

wiradikusuma 4y ago

Ah, now I understand why payment processors are not so friendly with porn, to avoid collateral damage.

exabrial 4y ago

PH and the people that work there are a 1000% liable for this person’s abuse. Publishing sensitive content without verifying the supply chain is a risky move, and they eventually got caught. 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
enos_feedler 4y ago
Isn’t the fact they aren’t a monopoly what gets them to change? Bill Ackman was on CNBC this morning ripping into them for like 15 minutes of prime air time on this issue. The CEO of Visa is nowhere to be heard from. I suspect the end result will be to revoke PH as a customer. Why? Because Mastercard and Amex exist
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  Sounds like Bill Ackman has a short on Visa.
  - enos_feedler 4y ago
    It would sound that way, which is why CNBC made him clear up any conflicts on air. He said he currently has 7 total long positions and zero shorts and no plans to enter anything with Visa. He was stretching to find a connection with Visa and the best he came up with is that Lowes accepts visa cards
tmpz22 4y ago
Ah yes American supply chain responsibility following the great American institutions like Nestle, Johnson and Johnson, Amazon, and my personal favorite the United Fruit Company.
- stephencanon 4y ago
  Nestle is Swiss.
- Jugurtha 4y ago
  Nitpicking: Nestlé is Swiss.
  - hmYesok 4y ago
    - Jugurtha 4y ago
      Nestlé France's employees are mostly French, too, as is the case with most multinationals.
      - hmYesok 4y ago
        Just a bunch of vain apes pretending their memorization of details of paperwork were the point of the original comment calling out application of agency Legally owned by some dumb apes in Switzerland, still act like typical indifferent human assholes to the rest of the species with their monopolization of resources Real human acts getting hidden and buried by political correctness. Stop with the stupid indirection
        dang 4y ago
        Could you please stop creating accounts that break the site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - 4y ago
georgia_peach 4y ago
Visa cut off Gab.com, on their own initiative, for incidentally carrying posts by the Pittsburgh shooter. Why didn't they exercise the same judgement against PornHub for incidentally carrying vids of child sexploitation? They opened themselves up to this line of legal reasoning.
- Miner49er 4y ago
  They did. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-ending-pornhub-payment-processing-unlawful-videos https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22168240/mastercard-endi...
  - jessaustin 4y ago
    TFA is about events in 2014. If anything, putting a stop to such things six years later makes them look more guilty.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Why haven’t they exercised the same judgment against Google for YouTube hosting abuse or Google Search indexing abuse?
  - georgia_peach 4y ago
    Money, probably.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Risk-reward... that's the only thing banks care about
- tiahura 4y ago
  That’s not a legal argument for liability. As a private company they’re perfectly free to pick who they do and don’t do business with. They just can’t do business with criminals engaged in criminality. 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
throwawaymanbot 4y ago
jffry 4y ago
VISA was trying to have themselves removed from the lawsuit before trial even happens, but this ruling is where the judge lays out why the plaintiff has both standing and a possible cause of action against them and therefore why they must be included in the lawsuit.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> private companies legislating morality 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.
- dizzant 4y ago
  Are you defending the position that as a society, we should continue to allow funding the creation of child pornography through means of crypto? 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.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    Of course not, child pornography is strictly within the domain of public schools, until those pesky parents infiltrate the boards.
  - georgia_peach 4y ago
    Can't speak for matheusmoreira, but I think Visa should handle payments & law enforcement should handle diddlers. Turning payment processors into an extra-judicial enforcement system on top of the existing one is a mess in so many different ways (jurisdiction, lack of due process, arbitrary enforcement, financial motives, conflict of interest, lack of transparency, etc...).
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    I'm saying it's the police's job to go out there, investigate and arrest child molesters, not some payment technology's. Money companies turning into extra-judicial law enforcement by means of risk assessment is how you get bullshit like PayPal's constant freezing of accounts.
- tomc1985 4y ago
  Too bad they have utterly failed at their stated purpose
mrtksn 4y ago
I agree but I think there's a caveat. I think it is possible to have situations where it is really hard to corner the offenders and it makes sense to go after the enablers. 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.
- SCLeo 4y ago
  Should the manufacturer of the camera be held responsible because they did not verify the purpose of the buyer and consequently allowing them to produce illegal material? (They could technically have some online DRM installed to all of their cameras and if it is reported that someone is making illegal material, they can brick those cameras in question.) 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.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    > Should the manufacturer of the camera be held responsible because they did not verify the purpose of the buyer and consequently allowing them to produce illegal material? 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.
cyan5 4y ago
dragonwriter 4y ago
> That said, I really don’t want the payment processor involved in a case like this. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tyiz 4y ago

You stab someone with a screwdriver, paid with a credit card and credit card service company is held responsible. This is the end of the world as we know it.

Aachen 4y ago
That is what it sounds like honestly, as if the payment provider has to go check on available security footage what the screwdriver was used for (in this case, they could have checked on the site and, potentially, by having their employees look at a lot of porn, found an instance of child porn somewhere) and then discontinue providing services to the store until they put background checks in place for customers. A lot more reasonable for porn than for screwdrivers, but to sue a party so far removed from the person who actually uploaded that child porn and is ultimately the main responsible party... then you can also sue the hosting company, the company that opened up the street to put in cables to transmit the child porn (they could have checked what it's used for), the ISP that was used to access it, et cetera This is really just suing everyone to see what sticks, no way that this goes anywhere... right?
- Miner49er 4y ago
  I can see there being a bar where it is reasonable that Visa should have known it was happening. For the screwdriver example, I think everyone would agree it would be unreasonable for Visa to know what was going to happen. 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.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    We know at least some screwdrivers (and other hand tools) are used for murder, based on records of murder by the government. Visa should have known the risk of screwdrivers without background checks! Why didn’t they cut off Home Depot?

violet5 4y ago

cromulent 4y ago

The recent FT podcast Hot Money went into some detail about how much control the payment card companies have over the porn industry. https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3244 https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...

vageli 4y ago

This seems to be a pre-trial motion where the plaintiff's allegations are assumed to be true. > 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.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Point is, even if everything they allege is true, I still think it's ludicrous that the payment processor could be held liable. 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?
- vageli 4y ago
  As the judge put it, a case could potentially be made that Visa knowingly provided the tools to MindGeek while aware of the child exploitation issues and could potentially be complicit. That potential means the case should proceed and be heard on its merits (at least as I understand it).

snoopen 4y ago

Seems like this misuse of the legal system would be a good way for a judge with bias against porn to drastically destabilise the industry. I'm not at all surprised tho considering it's a US court.

dfxm12 4y ago

The judge in this case was appointed by a Republican president. Republicans have recently started to come out against porn [0]. Legislating porn away would be drastically unpopular (and ostensibly unconstitutional), but of course, judges are appointed undemocratically and thus are above having to answer to voters, so using judges to attack big porn sites' income seems like the strategy they're going with. 0 - https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/culture-war-throwback-republicans-eye-porn-restrictions-rcna31640 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/culture-...

istinetz 4y ago
Why would it be unconstitutional? Is there any mention of porn in the US constitution at all?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Motion pictures aren't mentioned in the Constitution, but most would consider censoring movies to be a violation of free speech. Do you think because the Constitution doesn't specifically mention motion pictures, government should be able to directly or indirectly control what you watch?
- CGamesPlay 4y ago
  Porn is a form of speech, and speech is protected by the constitution.
  - shp0ngle 4y ago
    There are existing obscenity laws that are constitutional. Not all speech is allowed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test 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.

mikece 4y ago

While it's not clear from the article, if it can be shown that PH didn't act in a manner adequate to defend the plaintiff and an appeal was made to Visa to censure PH for not removing felonious material from their website -- material from which Visa themselves were making money -- then it stands to reason that Visa can be sued as a conspirator. I am not a lawyer but it might be against the law for Visa to have anything to do with the funding of child porn; if they were notified and didn't act sufficiently against PH I can see where there would be more than enough cause for a legal complaint.

bennyp101 4y ago

This seems a very slippery slope. 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?

tiahura 4y ago
It sure would suck if companies were pressured to be socially responsible.

nerdjon 4y ago

I feel for this woman, But I don't like where this is going. 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.

RajT88 4y ago
> This just feels like the steps towards a more puritanical America. One that looks at sex, porn, and similar things as immoral and "dirty". 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.
- nerdjon 4y ago
  I did not even think of that! Not only lack of regulation but also in places that make it even harder to hold people accountable (increased anonymity).
- truffdog 4y ago
  Being forced into the cash economy means being victimized by crime. 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.
  - RajT88 4y ago

lizardactivist 4y ago

Pornhub did the best they could and removed the videos as soon as they had knowledge of them, and the subsequent re-uploads. They never once argued or ignored her requests. 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.

5atlanta 4y ago

m000 4y ago

This gives more ground to VISA et al. to not want to touch anything sex-related with a ten-foot pole. The big losers here are the legit sex workers who are already having trouble receiving payment for their product.

deleted 4y ago

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mchusma 4y ago

I hate the visa/Mastercard duolopy and the way people attempt to use the networks to regulate things. Card networks should be an open carrier to all, not subject to political whims. It's just too dangerous to have payments anything other than a utility. 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.

sazz 4y ago

This should definitely be a warning sign for everybody who votes for cashless transactions in the future. 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.

charles_f 4y ago

I get the general sensation that it doesn't make sense to hold Visa responsible for something that sounds more of a pornhub issue, but the way I read this: it's just a pre-trial to look into Visa's request to be removed from the trial itself. They haven't been condemned. The judge's justification is that they were part of the financial transaction (albeit through advertising), and therefore there is a chance they could have a say. 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)