|
Raise Your Weapon
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Outback Australia
Posts: 15,601
|
There's an interesting thread on a bodybuilding site about this (I hope Eric will forgive me linking to a forum but I it shows the way people are starting to consider the prospect of free porn being limited at some stage)
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showth...6412753&page=1
Quote:
from torrentfreak:
http://torrentfreak.com/one-man-army...market-120705/
and
http://torrentfreak.com/paypal-bans-...ncerns-120710/
cliffs on the story:
-free porn is everywhere
-nobody pays for porn
-porn websites and their owners are hurting bad
-blame it on the availability of free porn
-they start going after file hosting and tube sites with visa, mastercard, and paypal
-visa, mastercard, paypal shut down payment processing for any service that touches free porn
-free porn sites can't make money
-free porn sites shut down and no b0ner for you
more info at: http://stopfilelockers.com
This could end free pr0n on the internet as we know it (srs) and it's all because of 1 single man.
First have to understand the economic model of "free", it's not really free it's just being subsidized by somebody else. Either through other people paying for "premium" access to mediafire/rapidshare/oron/filefactory/youjizz/youporn/etc or through advertisements or any combination of both. Most well known and obvious model of this is myfreecams, where you can watch for free and let others spend their money on "tips" but free porn sites have bills to pay too, they need web hosting, a **** load of storage, tons of bandwidth, and of course the regular expenses that any business requires.
In order to meet all of these needs free porn sites make money in one of 2 ways:
1. Premium access - This is more common with file hosting services (rapidshare, mediafire, oron, etc but some free tube sites like youjizz and youporn have premium memberships too where you pay something like $4 per month and get faster and unlimited downloads. Visa, mastercard, and paypal are putting an end to this, it's absolutely 0 tolerance for this model and as you can see in the torrentfreak link above they are already shutting down sites that use this business model.
2. Advertisements - You've seen the ads: "local moms looking to fuk", "this **** will make your penis fat bro", "doctor discovers penis enlargement pill that works", "hot sluts in your town, join for free", etc. For dating sites a lot of them claim to be free but actually if you want to send a message, view a profile, or any of that you have to buy a "premium" membership with your credit card. Same for the dik pills, they claim to be free but only after you signup with a trial which requires your credit card.
These are the types of ads that fund and fuel free porn sites but what visa, mastercard, and paypal are doing is saying that even sponsoring (aka advertising) free porn can get your ability to process credit card payments revoked. As a result advertisers will not put ads on these sites, which means they won't make any money off of ads, which means they won't make any money AT ALL so they'll have to shut down and no more free porn for you.
How it affects torrents:
Many public torrent sites like thepiratebay rely on ads and the advertisers there would be under the same scrutiny as advertisers on free porn sites so they're not going to risk losing the ability to process credit card payments just to advertise on there but it also affects private trackers because remember nothing is free, it's just subsidized.
So far the following companies have had their payment systems terminated:
DepositFiles.com
Uploading.com
mediafire.com
CramIt.in
imgchili.com
filedefend.com
filegag.com
letitbit.net
hitfile.net
easy-share.com
filestay.com
pigsonic.com
filerose.com
And now the people behind the "stop free porn" movement are setting up a non profit with volunteers and a collaboration system that is directly linked to visa, mastercard, and paypal so now instead of just 1 single guy working to shut down all these free porn sites, there will be hundreds if not thousands.
So with all this in mind and with the best possible advice being considered these are the things that have been done and are in the process of being done.
1. Today an Australian Company Limited by Shares was established as a legal entity to be a container for the whole effort. It's name is Copy Control Pty. Limited. It is established under Australian Corporations law and will live on as an entity in it's own right even if I had to stop working on this for any reason. The corporation also has as a recorded minuted decision of it's first meeting, to re-invest any profit each year back into the corporation, so it will act like a non profit in that all excess funds go into further expansion of operations and not into anyone's pocket.
2. It is not legal for an Australian Company Limited by Shares to raise funds such as dontations without a charitable fundraising permit. It is also unlikely that our operations would be considered charitable. Therefore to everyone who has contributed and anyone who wishes to contribute in future, you will have the option of receiving a paid invoice for "Copyright Protection Services" to the amount contributed. If you don't want in invoice that's fine, but if you do let me know and we will send you one by mail or if you prefer as a PDF in email.
3. As everyone knows we are finalizing our collaboration system. We have chosen Podio as the system we are going to use. The main reason it was chosen is that we already have experience with it. The secondary reason was that if you can use Facebook you can use Podio. With Podio we can assign people different roles and different levels of access.
It is even possible to provide people observer or guest access to see overall operations without revealing higher level confidential information. So for example a guest might be able to see our targets and compare them to our milestones. A guest might be able to tip us off about a site to target and will be able to search for targets we have already dealt with.
The Podio system will be rolled out in stages. Initially we will have only a handful of volunteers use it. However in the long term I see it becoming a centralised clearing house where people can report piracy in file lockers to begin with, then see a result. In other words we will have a system that provides a level of transparency and where people can see actual results as they happen.
4. People have suggest I cannot keep this up forever, this is true to an extent. This stopped being a solo effort a little while ago, however now we have clearly defined strategies in place we can spread the load beyond just my staff. As things progress I will be able to spend more time on oversight than actual slaying. I will be able to concentrate on the relationships with billing companies, credit card companies, ISP's , Network Providers and so on.
5. As of writing I own Stop File Lockers, Cold Copy and the other support sites, the web hosting and all the databases and so forth. However from midnight tonight all of that is officially and legally transferred to Copy Control Pty. Limited. No longer will I personally own or be liable for any of it.
6. If someone wants to sue us for whats on a site then they can only sue the legal entity. I will not be legally liable for any of it. The most that anyone launching a law suit can expect to receive is what assets the company holds, which is virtually nothing but contributions and a few domain names, databases, software and some office supplies.
7. As many people have been generous and have contributed in many ways I have decided to match all contributions dollar for dollar out of my own pocket to a cap of $50,000.
8. The company on it's website will publish financial reports and milestone reports on a quarterly basis for anyone to scrutinize. Additionally contributors will have access to guest access on Podio to watch how their contributions are spent and what progress is being made on targets.
9. We are working hard to streamline our reporting to Paypal and become more efficient at doing so. The collaboration system based on Podio will help us do that.
10. We will not need to focus on illegal pornography to keep Paypal's attention, nor that of Visa and Mastercard and the other processors. The issue of piracy is enough so from today onward we will simply report any suspicion of illegal pornography to the appropriate authorities and not deal with it in our blog posts or reports any longer. We are not qualified to do make any kind of judgement about what's a misleading liink name and what's dangerous material. We never open links so we can never know what's really behind them anyway. The authorities are best placed to deal with these issues.
11. We will , as some of you know, be launching a toll free hotline in the UK, USA and Australia/New Zealand for people to report sites to us. All we will ask for from callers is the name of the site and the type of material they found. No caller will be asked for URL's or details beyond those two simple things. Callers may speak to a live operator or leave a recorded message with their reports. We have delayed the introduction of the hotline until incorporation and will set about a launch date for some time next week.
12. If anyone has any questions, comments, criticisms or concerns I'd be glad to hear them.
Thanks for putting up with such a long post but I thought it was important to clearly state what was being done and why.
pepper your wallet misc, you will be forced to pay for porn soon. Either because the free porn will dry up since there is nobody to subsidize it or because they will join forces with religious/conservative groups and lobby the government for "adult verification" aka prove you're over 18 by providing your credit card in order to be allowed to see "obscene content".
|
|