vcproductions

if you have a site that excepts amateur vids without pay, do you have to maintain records on the age requirement for the people in the vid?

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scouser

I think so (I am not a lawyer or anything). But I would (require 2257 documentation etc), anyway, just so you know for sure the ages of the people etc...

(but tbh wait till someone replies who knows what they're talking about )

gwkg

Of course you do. Just because there is no pay involved doesn't mean you can host videos of underage kids.

vcproductions

well i thought so but im so new to all this im doing a crash course and making sure.

what about the new 2257 code, does it affect TGP sites where you have to maintain the records or provide the list of the sponsors who do maitain them?

thanks for you help.

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pornicopia

Hosting a site that allows for people to submit adult pics and or videos can be a pain int he butt. I had two and shut them down because I didn?t know the laws well enough at the time.

Always ask for ID for any submissions, and maintain them, hell I bought one of those cheap accordion folder boxes and viola! Instant custodian of records hehe.

Anyhow, If you have a TGP the sites and content providers will have a custodian if any problems arise. I would create a 2257.html or something that states:

--
All models, actors, actresses and other persons that appear in any visual depiction of actual sexually explicit conduct appearing or otherwise contained in this Website were over the age of eighteen years at the time of the creation of such depictions.

The original records required pursuant to 18 U.S.C. section 2257 and 28 C.F.R. 75 for materials contained in the website are kept by the appropriate site?s Custodian of Records respectively.--

If you are accepting submissions yourself, again I can?t stress enough how important it is to get copies of legal I.Ds.

vcproductions

thanks for the response, all info is very helpful for this newbie. im going thru a crash course right now and reading everything i can think of.

do you mind if i pm you some questions about your defunct sites?

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pornicopia

Sure thing!

vcproductions

well sites like xtube and pornotube put the responsibility on the person submitting the vid.

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pornicopia

Not all sites abide by US law..

luckydog

Just curious, since you seem to know a bit about this.... in your opinion do you think sites like xtube, etc that accept amateur submsissions but don't document id's.... do they put themselves at risk of being shut down? The reason I am asking this is that I am also thinking of doing an amateur site but if the responsibility is on the site owner then it seems like it could turn into a paperwork nightmare if you have hundreds or even thousands of amateur submissions. Is that why you shut down your sites?

And welcome vcproductions I am new here too...

vcproductions

glad to be here and welcome yourself.

your post sums up my question as well. if you go to xtube and pornotube they say they are released from that responsibility. what led me to them was an article stating that as well. that the responsibility falls on the person submitting the vid.

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luckydog

Yeah I went to xtube and was reading all of their disclaimers since I was curious. The way they worded it sounds like a slippery slope in my opinion. On the one hand they say they are not the primary producer, and that the custodian of record is the producers they list.... but.... they don't mention the amateur videos. It seems to me in that case since there's no custodian they would need the names and addresses of the amateur submitters so they could be contacted if there was an issue, or the ID documentation to be in compliance.

Anyway I really wanted to do an amateur site like what you are talking about, but this law seems kind of fuzzy to me with those types of videos. I may pass on the amatueur thing (for as much as I want to do it), just becuase if there's any possibility I could end up in legal trouble over this it just isn't work the risk...

vcproductions

my ideas are getting more refined every day and im looking to learn one aspect at a time now.

i dont remember where i got this article but i just pasted it in wordpad for reading later but this is what led me to xtube and pornotube.

"People have been making amateur porn and uploading it to YouTube since its inception; after all, it's human nature to sexualize any new technology. Smart online sites like Second Life, while not a sex site, take this need to sexualize as a grown-up given. In their architecture and business model, they just sort of budget in that adult users will use a certain percentage of their world for sex, and set up all the necessary precautions to make this a safe and sane (and even fun) experience for everyone, and easily avoided if you prefer real estate to RealDolls. According to Linden Labs/Second Life's Catherine Smith, "All 'adult content' is confined to Mature sims in Second Life and takes place behind closed doors."

But in the aftermath of Google's acquisition of YouTube, YouTube's methods of trying to control questionable content and Terms of Use (TOU) enforcement are emerging as clumsy at best, and highly exploitable at worst. Even so, YouTube's policies on porn and adult content have opened up a whole new market for an ever-growing roster of upload-it-yourself smut sites, while raising some interesting questions about businesses whose TOU and operational models turn a blind eye to the inevitable intersection of sex and technology.


Lawyer and executive director at The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Jennifer Granick adds: "Internet regulations tend to be ill-defined and confusing, and as a result, they are discriminatorily enforced. Companies have to guess whether they are going to be targets for regulators or law enforcement. As a result, general-interest content companies like YouTube or Google Images will choose to ignore regulations that special-interest content companies like a pornography video or photo site believes it must comply with."

As content delivery evolves, porn, as an extension of human sexual expression, follows. The Flickr spin-off sites are a great example: Flickrchicks, Adult Flickr, FlickrBooty (all defunct) and several others made up for what Flicker's TOU couldn't, or wouldn't, deliver (yet appeared on the site, regardless). These sites essentially skimmed Flickr for hotties to repost in babelog-style form and pull in affiliate click-through revenue, many knowing full well that the pictures they link to have a limited life span.

Many businesses have flourished where others decidedly feared to tread, rather than creating a healthy, inclusive and lucrative business structure. Where Google's AdSense wouldn't go, AdBrite mopped up the revenue. And when PayPal decided that grown-up money was filthy lucre, a whole host of adult transaction services were eager to Dumpster-dive for PayPal's sizable leavings.

Similarly, early this year sites like (NSFW) HotTube.wordpress. com and (NSFW) DudeTube.blogspot. com sprang up in the tradition of the Flickr spin-off babe sites, making the most of YouTube's easily accessed user-submitted content and its inconceivably exponential growth rate. Simply sifting through YouTube for porn and coming up with the goods over and over again and then reposting the juicy finds was enough to make these sites merit repeat visits for viewers. And knowing the content was against YouTube's TOU, sites like DudeTube often posted video embeds with the title "not around for long," acknowledging the temporary nature of the amateur offerings, whether the videos were explicit or not, with the understanding that YouTube's policies and policing were often bizarrely erratic and only a YouTube employee's judgment call away from removal.

By summer, YouTube had proved itself simply unreliable for a number of users -- not just for porn, but for being a content-delivery system for anyone whose content might get flagged by concerned or malevolent users and yanked by a YouTube customer service department that seemed to be in over their heads.


Similarly, Internet video site Veoh, which had been a smart, rational, useful place to upload and watch hard- and soft-core video, abruptly changed its TOU in June and no longer allowed adult content to be uploaded to its network -- all video deemed "pornographic (which shall include any depictions of nudity)." Veoh then did what many people have been wondering aloud about YouTube, and they scrubbed their site clean of anything that smelled like copyright infringement -- at least at the time.

Enter sites like (NSFW) Xtube.com, and the new era of porn-loving video sharing, user-submitted communities. Like YouTube (in fact, a lot like YouTube), Xtube has a similar user interface for viewers and uploaders alike, as do the more recently hatched competition (NSFW) YuVuTu.com (Caution: some users are experiencing malware installs) and (NSFW) PornoTube.com.


These sites have quickly filled with thousands of amateur and professional porn (and soft-core) clips featuring dozens of straight, gay and "everything" categories. Same flash upload/encode systems, same tagging systems, same pseudo-social network connecting users and favorites, and nearly identical options for easy URL grabbing and video player embeds for porn-happy bloggers.

For the founders of these sites, it was a no-brainer to build a smart, sex-positive YouTube clone. Steve Jacobs from YuVuTube said, "YouTube clearly missed a trick when they decided not to include adult material, as that is more likely to be monetizable. We started YuVuTu simply because we saw that YouTube and its competitors were staying out of adult. We felt that amateur productions can compete with professional productions far better than in any other genre (sport, comedy, action movies, music videos, etc.), so it's obvious to us that the YouTube model of user-generated content will be most successfully applied to adult content." Jacobs added, "The jury is still out as to whether YouTube has a viable business model."

Lance Cassidy, marketing director of Xtube, explained how YouTube's market practically demanded the delivery system ASAP: "YouTube was rockin' it and no one had an answer to them for the adult industry. We were actually not sure we would be first on the scene and hesitated, but once we looked, we were shocked and hurried to it." Though it may seem like YouTube's sex clones rushed to fill a gap in the market in typical dot-boom style, their business models have been built from the start to openly deal with adult content, making direct eye contact with many issues that could streamline TOU enforcement on nonporn sites like YouTube -- and not just in terms of avoiding dreaded uploads of underage or otherwise illegal content.

For example, from the outset Xtube has actively partnered with adult companies and porn auteurs to offer free DVD previews, circumventing the lure of copyright-infringing uploads from users. They also offer options for filmmakers to sell streaming clips to users, providing a nice one-two of both free and monetized content options outside ad-revenue models. Xtube also has the most stringent user interface for actively managing and explaining copyright permissions and age-of-consent 2257 documentation as requirements within the user interface for upload, explicitly making users responsible for legality of content.

Having a reliable content-delivery system for porn makes all of our hard drives smile -- but being realistic about your users and what they'll want to do with your content-delivery system makes everyone happy, from censorship to legalities to contributing to a more-needed-than-ever healthy attitude toward human sexual expression. Building your tech in keeping with the way people will use it will always make more sense than trying to change human behavior. Just don't actually call it GooTube, OK?"

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luckydog

Thanks for posting, that was an interesting read. Based on what that lawyer said, it sounds like it's not really clear either way. It doesn't sound like xtube keeps documentation and says it's the submitters responsibility, but if law enforcement went after them, would they be in the clear or would they be busted? That part still seems unclear to me.

Have you decided yet if you are going to offer amateur uploads on your site? I am still kind of undecided. Basically I just don't want to invest a whole bunch of time and money into something that the law isn't really clear on if it means I could be in trouble somehow. If I decide to do it I think I am going to have to talk to a lawyer first to find out what I should do. Otherwise it seems like kind of a gamble if your site happens to be the one the FBI decides to audit....

vcproductions

right now im very new to every aspect of this business. now that im reading up and analyzing all different kinds of sites, and reading every thread here, my plan is to learn and implement one avenue at a time. im gonna do a tgp site first. keep learning about traffic. then add things to my site as i learn. the idea i have is to have a community site in the end, similar to eroticy.com. the content will be from affiliates, i will have a forum, i will supply my own cam feeds as well, vids and pics and eventually have the capability for users to upload amateur content.

thats it in a nutshell, and im sure i'll refine it along the way, get frustrated, wanna quit or whatever. but since im unclear on exactly which route to take, i wanna hit em all. but my only goal right now is to learn every aspect first, and if i make some cash along the way thats just a bonus right now. i have a job, im not filthy rich but i make enough to support my 'hobby'. and i have a few ideas on some other sites, more refined type sites, like a bangbus or asstraffic type site. simple but catchy.

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Ryan St. Germain

Not only do you have to ahve paperwork, but you have to have very specific paperwork. The free speech coalition site has some good information that you'll proobably want to look at.