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Comment by lja | Hacker News Reader

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If i go to the website it looks like a service for porn producers like only fans to trigger DMCA to porn sites. So why are you coming with this story when the business model is something else. I guess to promote your site.

No we get 1000 signups a day for all revenge porn take down. We do help content creators but the vast majority of our customers are consumers taking down non-consensual intimate images.

Edit: HN isn’t our demo so I’m not trying to promote it here.

Any idea why these victims go through you rather than through charities like https://stopncii.org/ who offer takedowns for free? I can see the value-add of monitoring, but the price you're asking seems rather steep for (often vulnerable) victims of revenge porn.

StopNCII is amazing but they don’t do the searching part unless you have an exact hash which most don’t have if it’s a hidden camera or a video.

You are abusing the wrong law to do the right thing. You should be using privacy related laws for revenge porn, not copyright ones. Your actions prove OP's point.

I doubt revenge porn victims would pay $25 per month to send two free takedowns.

This is clearly a service aimed at sex workers protecting their work. In that case, the DMCA certainly does apply.

Flavouring their description with language like "non-consensual" seems dishonest, though.

There is value in the Takedown service but our major value is the facial recognition search.

If you think that people won’t pay $25 to remove all the images and videos uploaded to porn across the internet with a few button clicks then you’ve clearly never had to worry about such things.

Someone would have to spend $500k to scan and process the internet before they could come close to offering the coverage we could for $25.

It’s incredible what kind of bubble HN lives in sometimes.

EDIT: also, we limit it to two free DMCA’s to prevent abuse and we have a tutorial on our site on how to do your own DMCA for free.

We’re not running an exploitative business, we’re helping people.

Yeah but if DMCA takedowns have a more immediate effect (the revenge porn is removed ideally before it has a chance to spread further), they're the better option in this case.

Could you do both? DMCA for a fast response, then a civil privacy related lawsuit for compensation etc? The civil suit can take ages.

Why pursue the civil case? Our clients just want it gone. They aren’t looking to drag it out.

There are no privacy laws that protect people from these kinds of uploads. We only have DMCA. Your vitriol only proves a lack of education around these topics.

Which country in the world do your customers live in where there's no privacy laws regarding revenge porn? I'll look them up myself, since ad hominem seems to be your only argument.

Inferring it's the USA from DMCAs, which states are lacking privacy laws, thus making revenge porn legal?

Show me the privacy law that makes sites like motherless or 4chan archives take down images in the United States?

Why would I do anything else when I’m not abusing DMCA.

AFAIK the DMCA doesn't cover personality/publicity rights, so those would be false DMCA reports.

Our claims aren’t in personality/publicity rights it’s on model release forms. Literally an unauthorized model that they are commercializing from a non-public setting.

I would argue that’s a very good example of why it’s a bad law.

The intent is good, but what are we talking about here? This law, the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act”, used to pull down content that is effectively an invasion of privacy? How do those things at all intersect?

It’s too broad and too able to be abused. Laws should be very precise and narrow.

Regarding privacy, we should have laws on the books to protect one’s privacy in cases where the public as no interest of import.

We aren’t abusing it. These people featured in this non-consensual imagery haven’t signed model release forms so running ads on their content without reimbursing them is a commercial infringement.

We’re not arbitrarily sending DMCA’s to get things taken down. Our copyright holders haven’t approved of and are not benefiting from the financial gains of their stolen works.

It sounds cold to phrase it that way, but that’s how America protects its people, only as a function of money.

You’re not abusing it because it was written to be abusive. The law itself is abusive, your usage of it just illustrates its ability to be flexible enough to be used way outside its intended bounds.

I applaud your work and I stand by what I said about narrow and focused laws for protecting privacy. It’s not every day we can do something good with something bad, but I don’t know if the good that is done fully outweighs the bad that it causes, especially when better options could exist.

You are abusing it and I am making complaints right now to your payment provider and hosting. Thanks.

We have very close relationships with Trust and Privacy officers at both our payment providers and AWS. They love what we’re doing and have facilitated introductions to other organizations.

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