Live data from Hacker News

Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

translate.google.com

51–60 of 86 posts

Re: Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

#52

Alas, Hacker News - - - I knew ye well. (poor subject for this site)

I find your reaction fascinating. You find the topic of porn so disturbing that a mere (very dry) discussion of its business side ruins the entire experience of HN for you? On a side note, you may be naif about hacker culture. On one hand, a lot of hackers consume porn (by virtue of the fact that a large percentage of the general population does). On the other, we tend to be curious about stuff, even stuff that is co…

Especially given that the article was released in a very renowned german newspaper in the "business and finances" section. There's no actual porn anywhere around.

Re: Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

#53
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bad example to use because the prosecutor claims to have Skype chat logs of Megaupload assisting in the upload of illegal material as well as uploading their own illegal material. This would instantly remove their DMCA safe harbor protections as it relies on Megaupload not being aware of illegal material on their platform. Further it also requires that Megaupload have no financial gain directly attributable to…

If governments and by extension, courts gets pushed enough, laws about safe harbor means nothing. Laws in general means little in this case. The pirate bay case in Sweden is the best example of this. The by law required impartial police investigator was hired by one of the parties the day after he finished his work. A several order higher paying job. the exact day after he finished his report on the pirate bay. When…

I'm not sure what the pirate bay has to do with Megaupload. I'm not arguing anything in general here, I'm just saying in the specific case of Megaupload there really wasn't foul play outside of procedural errors, if the claims of the prosecutor are true then Megaupload were indeed breaking the law and the DMCA safe harbor protection meant nothing. The Pirate Bay is entirely unrelated.

Re: Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

#55
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been out of the loop for too long, but back in the day (when Tube sites were just starting up), it was getting harder and harder to make money. So many people were starting up, and Visa was cracking down hard on charge backs. The biggest issue back in the day was Content licencing, which with today's whole DMCA crap, I would expect it to be far worse on a user-generated content site. If you licensed images for a…

For the record, he's talking about user-generated content so even if users upload unlicenced materials he's covered by DMCA protections. He won't have to worry about licencing content, since he won't knowingly use copyrighted content beyond what freebies are offered to CPA partners. I think everything you're saying makes sense for a Paysite, but he's not a paysite---just an affiliate and traffic producer which is a b…

Most "user generated" porn sites have almost exclusively unlicensed content. You're using "user submission" here as a cheap trick to get free content.

Re: Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

#56
post #2

I've always mused with the idea of creating a user-submitted-content based porn website. The base code can be whipped out in a few days, and getting traffic for that kind of thing seems to be super easy. The goal would then be to make minor money through smart advertising (most porn websites today are usability hell, with every single white space covered in ads; i'm sure one could do some smart conversion optimizatio…

I question how much of the "user submitted porn" is actually user submitted. Flickr, YouTube, etc i buy that all the content is submitted by users. Porn sites, it seems far more likely that the content is mostly uploaded by paid staff. It's hard for me to believe that there are people who see a porn they like and think "wow, I should submit this to youporn". If you're going to build a porn site, the biggest part of t…

I don't know, if you browse certain subreddits you will find a lot of user submitted content which was submitted for free.

Re: Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As megaupload shows, it doesn't even matter if you are protected from DMCA safe harbor. If a prosecutor thinks you are not, they will destroy your business without recourse.

In terms of risk, I think its far less likely that a prosecutor will go after an adult site than say a music sharing site. The adult market has no one with the clout of the RIAA to lobby congress.

Indeed, the only real protection the "legit" porn industry has is to wave the 2257 around and try to use the thread of child pornography to get other sites shut down.

Re: Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

#59
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure about that. I just worked on a website that contained some video (for a children's show TV format), and we did some calculations on what hosting the video would cost. With 50 Mb/video, you can do 20 video's for 1 Gb of traffic. Which, at AWS cost 12 cents. Let's say you'd pay half that at a cheaper CDN, 6 cents. You would, just for transporting the video, need to make 6/20=0.3 cents/page. That's $3 CP…

AWS is the most expensive "CDN" that I've ever seen in my life. Their prices rival Akamai and their service certainly doesn't. With volume, you can get CDN pricing to 1 cent/page. The adult market, if nothing else, is a place where even mid-range sites can have massive volume and cut special deals.

Akamai also doesn't service porn at all.

(S)limelight seems to be what a lot of sites use.

Re: Programmer behind YouPorn empire arrested in Belgium

#60

Alas, Hacker News - - - I knew ye well. (poor subject for this site)

This is a technical and business discussion regarding hosting of large quantities of user-submitted / user-generated video content.

This is squarely within the mandate and range of interests of Hacker News.

Post reply on HN