71–80 of 86 posts
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Do not wanting to pay 45m out of 100m (or even less) is not a greed, it is a common sense.
Actually not paying your taxes however is illegal, no matter your motivation.
Tax planning, even if it involves a double Irish with a Dutch sandwich, is not.
Sometimes the actual amount you pay is essentially zero.
I sometimes don't understand how American Porn Tubes can survive with 18 USC § 2257: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2257
You don't ship anything made with materials -- the videos are all digital, so there is no shipping or transportation going on at all -- so what you are doing doesn't fall under that requirement.
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If I were to do it, I'd just run a porn site and a non porn site with the same code base. Then I could make money from porn while talking about the non porn side of the technology at parties or whatever. Also, I think there was a bit of a land grab in porn before; it has really consolidated to a few big players, with margins otherwise in decline. Manwin/youporn is one of those big players, from the article. The other…
>run a porn site and a non porn site with the same code base so like reddit then
The guy has to be making crazy bank. Wonder why he didnt just pay his taxes. When you are bringing in a likely 100m a year, what difference will another 10m make? I think the guys behind huge sites like this just have weird personality's that make them like to hack every system they can which obviously ends up in situations like this.
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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…
The main thing that changed in the industry is that now these adult video streaming sites basically serve you the content for free, and like television that's paid for by the advertisers, it's paid for through affiliate fees. These are mainly affiliates for the online gambling companies who don't have access to other advertising channels, and a bit of adult dating. The issue is that conversion from this type of conte…
Clips4sale has a good business model. I can see this being the future. But micro-payments in porn are hard.
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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…
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.
This is one of the most virulent misconceptions about copyright law on HN. The DMCA does not say that you are protected as long as you honor takedown notices. In addition to honoring them, you must not have any specific knowledge of infringing use of your service that you fail to act on. If any idiot can hit the front page of your site and see that it's used mostly for piracy, law enforcement will take an interest in you once you get big. If, during discovery, they find email messages showing you conspiring to keep copyrighted material on your site, they'll charge you criminally.
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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.
If your service is protected solely on the concept of safe harbor, that will then only work if you can stay small and unnoticed by the state. As soon your service name pops up in politics, laws like safe harbor will no longer protect you. The pirate bay case is an example of a website, which though safe harbor would protect them in regard to user-uploaded content. They where wrong in that regard.
The reason they haven't is that you're wrong. The DMCA doesn't stop working when you get big. It stops working when you take steps to ensure that infringing content is featured on your site.
For a bulletin board full of nerds, we sure are happy to insult each other's intelligence about what MegaUpload was. What kind of an idiot do you have to be to not understand what made MegaUpload popular? Are you really willing to write a comment in public under your real name saying that MegaUpload was a good piece of software? That sentiment doesn't make you feel embarrassed as an engineer? It was a crappy piracy site; it was popular solely because it was an effective way to upload and download pirated movies and TV shows. If it had been a Dropbox competitor, we'd all be making fun of it, instead of pretending like its founders are technology martyrs.
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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.
It very much does matter if you're protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA. The problem is that Kim Schmitz and his team did things, including paying contributors to upload copyrighted material, that forfeited their protections. Prosecutors didn't make this stuff up; the requirements for claiming service provider protections are right there in the law. The prosecution has Schmitz and associates in their…
But what happened instead was that a prosecutor found they were not protected under safe harbor. With the stroke of a pen, that turned the business into a criminal racket. Overly general mafia and drug war laws then allow the prosecutor to confiscate property and freeze funds, killing the business.
Of course a judge still has to sign off, but there are no provisions for the accused to defend themself or even be informed of the process.
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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.
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…