Mastercard Lays Down New Rules For Streaming Sites That Require Them To Review Content Before Publication

from the war-on-porn-continues dept

Mastercard is in the process of killing off another way for sex workers to make money. Its updated policy on "illegal adult content" takes aim at a bunch of adult content that isn't actually illegal. What the new policy does is make it impossible for streaming platforms to comply with the new rules. Since they're not able to prescreen streamed content, they're just going to start blocking anything that seems like it might lead to Mastercard pulling the plug.

This will hit sites like OnlyFans and MyFreeCams the hardest, as sex worker/advocate Mary Moody points out. But it will also cause collateral damage at streaming sites that aren't able to comply with Mastercard's new demands and may start banning accounts and blocking streams if they suspect (without verifying) "adult content" might be offered.

Here's what Mastercard is requiring from sites hosting content:

• Documented age and identity verification for all people depicted and those uploading the content

• Content review process prior to publication

• Complaint resolution process that addresses illegal or nonconsensual content within seven business days

• Appeals process allowing for any person depicted to request their content be removed

Some of these are steps that platforms should be taking already. But the second bullet point poses significant challenges. This "for the children" effort will harm adults who produce adult content -- many who have never produced any content considered "illegal" under the First Amendment. Mastercard cites its partnership with several law enforcement agencies (as well as child porn clearinghouses like NCMEC) but doesn't say why it feels all adult content should be subject to rules meant to prevent the streaming of illegal content.

In the absence of any meaningful efforts on Mastercard's part (this puts the onus on everyone else but the credit card company), a statement like this is meaningless:

We’re committed to doing everything in our power to ensure only lawful activity takes place on our network.

But Mastercard isn't actually doing anything. It's handing out more requirements for platforms that accept Mastercard payments, but that's not actually doing something. That's making a bunch of other people jump through impossible hoops under the threat of defunding. And it will cause damage to plenty of lawful activity.

Mastercard is free to choose who it does business with. But if it just wants to dump cam sites used by sex workers, it could at least come out and say that, rather than hide behind "for the children" platitudes as it makes it impossible for sites like this to host actually legal content. This is just more anti-porn crusading that willfully lumps child porn and revenge porn in with legal content created by adults. Then Mastercard makes it impossible for platforms to comply without cutting off a majority of their user base.

Filed Under: infrastructure, payments, sex work, streaming sites
Companies: mastercard, onlyfans

Texas Court Orders Sports Streaming Sites To Be Blocked In Anticipation Of Piracy

from the pre-crime dept

A few years ago, we wrote about HBO and Showtime's somewhat novel decision to file a lawsuit against two sports streaming sites for copyright infringement that both claimed would happen... in the future. The lawsuit was filled with understandably novel language, but the fact remained that this was something akin to pre-crime enforcement, best demonstrated in the film Minority Report. One of the chief axioms of American law is that a crime must have occurred for punishment to be doled out. Injunctions are a departure from that, but actually suing for infringement when that infringement hadn't happened yet and, indeed, when the content to be infringed didn't even yet exist, seemed like a departure from the way the law works.

But perhaps this is a practice we'll see expanded, as it seems to be happening again. This time, a federal court in Texas has issued an injunction ordering ISPs to proactively block a group of streaming sites ahead of the Premier League cricket tournament.

This is also the path Indian media outfit Times Content Limited (TCL) decided to go down. The company operates the cricket channel Willow TV and owns the US broadcasting rights to the Indian Premier League cricket tournament, which is currently ongoing. Two weeks ago the company sued several sports streaming sites including smartcric.com and crickethdlive.com. These sites allow users to watch cricket games for free over the Internet, without permission. To stop this from taking place, the Indian company requested a broad injunction, which the court granted last week.

The preliminary injunction (pdf) orders various third party providers to stop working with these sites effective immediately to prevent future copyright infringements. This also applies to any new domain names or websites the operators may launch.

Now, there are a couple of things to stipulate here. The websites in question appear to be common sports streaming sites that regularly infringe on the copyright of others. The injunction also suggests that Willow TV has attempted to communicate with the sites many times and has not received much in the way of a response. Whatever you think about copyright and sports streaming sites, it's not like Willow TV has no reason to complain here.

Still, when one paints a picture of justice on a legal system canvas, it's not simply about what picture you paint but how you paint it that's important. After all, precedence is a thing, as are the norms of how the law is carried out. The injunction's inclusion of language like the following seems to set us all on a dark path to prior restraint of speech.

...all service providers whose services will enable or facilitate Defendants' anticipated infringement are ordered to suspend all services with respect to [ the offending websites]...

Again, whatever you might think of sports streaming sites such as the defendant sites, opening the door to broad injunctions on the basis of future infringement seems like a mistake. It's a door that will almost certainly be barged through by copyright holders all over the place and is fertile soil for wanton abuse. The injunction goes to great lengths to acknowledge its order is based on all kinds of past infringing activities by the websites in question, but there is no clear standard for how much infringement must take place prior to a court being able to take down what is ultimately speech pre-emptively in anticipation of infringement in this way.

We must hope this practice is not expanded, or you can expect to see the collateral damage stories begin to appear.

Filed Under: anticipation of infringement, copyright, infringement, pre-crime, sports, streaming, streaming sites
Companies: tcl, willow tv

EU Court Of Justice Says Embedding Is Not Infringing: Could Mean Streaming Sites Are Legal

from the well-that's-interesting... dept

Way back in 2006 -- not all that long after video sites like YouTube and DailyMotion began -- we raised the simple question: is embedding infringing content infringing itself? We noted how problematic it was to argue that embedding was infringing, while also noting that it was far from a settled issue. Over the years since then, the issue has come up many, many times. Viacom raised it against YouTube. Bloggers got accused of infringement just for embedding a YouTube video. The MPAA went after sites for embedding videos. And, more recently, with the rise of "streaming" sites, many sites targeted for takedowns or domain seizures don't host any content at all, but merely embed from other sites. But still, that legal question has been in limbo: is it really infringing to merely embed some content that is hosted elsewhere? Two years ago, in the 7th Circuit appeals court, Judge Richard Posner somewhat vehemently rejected the idea that embedding was infringing in the Flava Works case (though, for slightly odd legal reasons). Around the same time, there was a court case in the Netherlands that went the other way, saying that embedding could be infringing.

TorrentFreak, however, now lets us know that in an important ruling from the EU Court of Justice (responding to a request from a German court), it has been declared that, under EU law, embedding is not infringing.

The Court argues that embedding a file or video is not a breach of creator’s copyrights under European law, as long as it’s not altered or communicated to a new public. In the current case, the video was already available on YouTube so embedding it is not seen as a new communication.

“The embedding in a website of a protected work which is publicly accessible on another website by means of a link using the framing technology … does not by itself constitute communication to the public within the meaning of [the EU Copyright directive] to the extent that the relevant work is neither communicated to a new public nor by using a specific technical means different from that used for the original communication,” the Court’s verdict reads.

This raises an awful lot of questions about the efforts by law enforcement to completely shut down streaming sites, most of which don't host content of their own at all. Considering how many of the "rogue" sites that the industry loves to attack as being evil and insists must be shut down do nothing more than embed, it will be interesting to see what comes next. If I had to guess, industry folks and the City of London Police will keep taking down those sites, and many won't bother fighting back. But it seems like if a few sites really fought back there could be some interesting legal rulings in response.

Update: Still waiting for an English translation of the ruling to come out, but IPKat has a good post noting that it's somewhat unclear if this ruling includes the embedding of infringing works, or only authorized works. It sounds like that particular issue was avoided by the court -- even though there are claims that the video in question in this lawsuit was uploaded without authorization in the first place:

In the national proceedings in BestWater, the claimant has been claiming that its film [a 2-minute long commercial] was uploaded onto Youtube “without its permission”. If and to which extent the work had been communicated by the right owner itself on any other website is not clear by reading the decisions of the Bundesgerichtshof or the CJEU, and neither is the issue of whether the work was subsequently uploaded onto Youtube with the permission of the copyright owner. So the facts of the case remain vague in this respect. The CJEU’s reasoning that there is “in particular” no “communication to the public” if the work is made available “with permission”… (para 16. See to this effect Svensson, paras 25 - 28) does not really help solving these uncertainties.

In short, the court ruling is not entirely clear on the embedding of infringing videos, meaning that there will likely need to be another case before this question is really answered.

Filed Under: copyright, embedding, eu, eu court of justice, europe, streaming sites