It's a balance. Suppose you add this proof requirement. What happens then? It's not as simple as lots of legitimate amateur content producers facing additional friction. Most will make the explicit decision not to have their legal name and address associated with pornographic content. Others will upload their content anyway, without doing an audit of the different platforms' security postures or being aware of the likelihood of and outcomes from breaches.
What happens in a breach? Now, you're probably thinking, just require the platforms to be secure! But you can't simply will that into existence, and I guarantee you it's impossible. So ultimately you've made people vulnerable when they weren't before, and you're setting up a situation where it's pretty much inevitable that they'll be exposed and threatened by stalkers, deranged fans, and ideological zealots.
Let's suppose you bite the bullet, and say turning all the porn platforms into outlets for major porn production companies is the way to go. At least we've eliminated revenge porn, right? No. Large masses of people really hate that kind of mass produced porn, so they jump to foreign platforms that don't require complicated ID verification. These sites end up with the large majority of amateur porn content, along with the revenge porn. But they're now out of the reach of US law enforcement, so the victims of revenge porn would then be in a worse position than they are today.
Now we're getting to even more extreme measures. Maybe the US needs to build a national firewall to prevent the foreign criminals from penetrating our great nation and undermining our morals with porn that's unapproved by the Feds? China is way ahead of the game on this, in that pornography is outright illegal, and it has sophisticated internet security measures that are exceptional in breadth and depth by Western standards. How's its war on porn going? Spoiler alert: it's lost it. Perhaps it could be a moment to build cross-cultural empathy, as Chinese netizens exchange tips with Americans on how to use Shadowsocks to avoid the censors and access amateur porn.
Requiring ID verification is one of those things that sounds good and moral on its face, but has so many unintended downstream consequences that exacerbate the original problem while making things generally worse.
So all professional porn already requires identification and age checks. I'm...not convinced it's the end of the world if amateur ones do too. The considerations are the same.
Professional pornstars are the people that are okay being known in public as a pornstar. There are also vast swaths of people who make content, but don't want to be known as "the pornstar" when they show up to their job on Monday.
I would imagine it's quite hard to get a job if the top Google result for your name goes to PornHub because all their identification info got leaked.
I think the amateur producers deserve respect for their privacy. Having all your amateur porn tied back to you because of an identification leak is going to screw up your life a lot. I guess the question is, are we willing to risk the privacy of the amateur producers to offer some extra level of protection to revenge porn victims? I say some because there will basically always be sites that don't enforce ID requirements. As long as there's demand for that kind of thing, it will find a way. The war on drugs hasn't eliminated drugs, and I sincerely doubt the war on revenge porn is going to be drastically more successful.
I hate the DMCA, but I'd rather see a DMCA-like process where you can submit a request to take down the video. They can either take it down and avoid liability, or refuse to take it down and accept liability if the complaint turns out to be valid.
People appearing in professional porn today are almost by definition those who are most comfortable getting identification and age checks; the ability to maintain anonymity is a key concern for most amateurs. Adding the same verification process to amateur porn is more or less making all porn professional porn, not mildly tweaking the nature of amateur porn. Amateurs would be faced with a choice of 1) effectively going pro, 2) fleeing to a different platform, or 3) exiting porn production altogether. I'm fairly confident that 2) would be the largest proportion of people, closely followed by 3), with 1) a distant third.
There already are professionally produced things with amateurs seeking to maintain anonymity. And yet, documents are signed, checks are written. The paperwork is just kept offline.
Yes, it may make it harder for an amateur seeking to upload something they filmed themselves, and who are not looking to build a brand or collect a payment for it. Not sure how many of those there are. But as soon as you're looking to do one of those things, there are existing allegories you can look to to figure out how it might be enabled.
I'm not arguing that it's impossible to verify people: it's clearly not. The point is that it will end up being a painful and risky enough process that amateurs will respond by switching to other platforms hosted overseas, outside the reach of law enforcement. This will provide a space where the exact same problem as exists now--commingling of legitimate amateur porn and nonconsensual videos--reproduces itself, except with no tools available to expunge the videos that need to be expunged.
Every proactive approach has this downside. That's why we should focus more on making it easy for victims to report a video and have it and variations of it removed from all sites nearly immediately, as well as making sure laws are on the books making it easy to prosecute offenders.
What you’re arguing for can be classified under the “slippery slope fallacy”.
We have repeatedly seen that, while deplatforming does drive content creators to move to other platforms, these platforms will not have the same reach as the mainstream ones. I.e. it’s not a perfect remedy but it’s quite effective.
Not all pro porn requires age checks. That made in the US certainly does, but the requirement isnt universal. Nor is the definition of porn. Many european "art" websites (nudes, generally no sex acts) are not pornographic and feel no need to maintain such records. Playboy would probably not be considered "porn" in many jurisdictions, at least in terms of production. What it is when found on your hard drive while sitting in the US is another matter.
You're aware that the vast majority of amateur porn is some person sending some other person nudes, right? You're effectively arguing for everyone should have to provide ID with every "u up??". Let's not make the insane over-enforcing of nudes worse.
If you don’t check ID and age, then you are recklessly running the risk of hosting underage pornography and revictimizing minors with every impression.
If anyone recalls the old “Girls Gone Wild” days where they sold videos/dvds via late night info commercials there was a very famous criminal case and civil lawsuit that put them out of business because they filmed underage girls who produced fake identification...while most crimes require intent and the fake ID would generally have made it possible to prove intent, underage sex/pornography is a strict liability crime so if it happens it’s criminal regardless of intent.
Wikipedia seems to indicate that the Girls Gone Wild folks survived the lawsuit that you're talking about and were eventually driven out of business due to other legal problems.
You are reading into the dates far to much, and they didn’t survive the underage girl criminal and civil cases.
Subsequent to those underage cases which began in 2003 additional civil lawsuits were also brought against the company for other issues, but those underage cases were still ongoing.
A different example would be the Hogan/Gawker case which started in 2013. The company faced other lawsuits after, but it was the hogan case that pushed them into bankruptcy because it didn’t end until 2016.
Wouldn't it be simpler to make porn a regulated commodity that only the government, or those it authorises with permits, can produce? Like alcohol. But why stop there? Let's make sex a regulated activity that only the government can approve. This will solve the whole consent problem in the regulated space because every sexual interaction will be pre approved and in writing, with a no harm no foul escape clause if anyone changes their mind.
/S
But seriously, there's problems. if you want to ID people it might be easier to make every video begin with the actors holding up a placard that's like an anonymous crypto QR token clapper that somehow only government sensors can officially check, that's like a hash of their face id, and it's all in a big government bloom filter for registered porn stars. But then you couldn't stop people prefixing an unapproved video with their identities... Maybe the tech angle of not the right way to deal with this....
What happens in a breach? Now, you're probably thinking, just require the platforms to be secure! But you can't simply will that into existence, and I guarantee you it's impossible. So ultimately you've made people vulnerable when they weren't before, and you're setting up a situation where it's pretty much inevitable that they'll be exposed and threatened by stalkers, deranged fans, and ideological zealots.
Let's suppose you bite the bullet, and say turning all the porn platforms into outlets for major porn production companies is the way to go. At least we've eliminated revenge porn, right? No. Large masses of people really hate that kind of mass produced porn, so they jump to foreign platforms that don't require complicated ID verification. These sites end up with the large majority of amateur porn content, along with the revenge porn. But they're now out of the reach of US law enforcement, so the victims of revenge porn would then be in a worse position than they are today.
Now we're getting to even more extreme measures. Maybe the US needs to build a national firewall to prevent the foreign criminals from penetrating our great nation and undermining our morals with porn that's unapproved by the Feds? China is way ahead of the game on this, in that pornography is outright illegal, and it has sophisticated internet security measures that are exceptional in breadth and depth by Western standards. How's its war on porn going? Spoiler alert: it's lost it. Perhaps it could be a moment to build cross-cultural empathy, as Chinese netizens exchange tips with Americans on how to use Shadowsocks to avoid the censors and access amateur porn.
Requiring ID verification is one of those things that sounds good and moral on its face, but has so many unintended downstream consequences that exacerbate the original problem while making things generally worse.