The problem for him will be the burnt bridges. Similar allegations have been brought up against him and others in the past and the accused largely came out unscathed. It seems that the industry is far less comfortable with it this time around and there seem to be harsh consequences.
I doubt the consequences are an expression of shock, it seems far more likely it's just a way to protect your brand's reputation (like we've previously seen with advertisers on YouTube). If that's the case I find it doubtful he'll find it easy to benefit from his old contacts until this blows over.
Unless he's literally recording himself in his room and uploading to his website, he needs people to work with him. And even then he'd still be a the whim of a hosting company.
Searched this entire thread and no mention of DMCA or Safe Harbors. Linking to a 3rd party is good to avoid worrying about that sort of stuff. Not that I'm an advocate for illicit rehosting, but just commenting as an observer.
It gets briefly touched on at the very end of the article, but self-hosting may carry with it a whole lot of extra work to avoid getting a big bullseye painted on the company. I'm sure more than a few content creators - probably in the adult business - have their lawyers on speed dial. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Almost certainly not. You'd basically have to argue it was malicious (i.e., served no reasonable business purpose, as if they purposefully lured him onto YT to destroy his reputation)
I bet he can find himself in a lot of trouble if he republishes something slanderous. He would be a co-defendant with the site that originally published it.
Imagine a scenario where somebody makes a slanderous comment on some silly little web page that not very people know or care about. If his page becomes very popular, the financial damages may be almost entirely due to the fact that people saw the comment on his page rather than the original.
Anyway, didn't we banter about another company pulling an asshole move like this a while back? They set it up so it looked like companies that didn't use their service were neglecting their customers?
The other websites are not separate matters, though. They're all services provided as part of an agreement that he violated. And it looks like he violated that agreement knowingly and flagrantly.
No need to imagine. There's an enormous amount of case law here. It has repeatedly been upheld that hosts are not liable for hosted content published by others (at least in the US):
He confesses that it was a black hat "proof of concept", but he's refunded the money and reported things to Patreon.
Patreon, and ANY website that has user's profiles as permalinks, should reserve ANY account name that has been deleted to prevent squatting.
I'm not sure how this works with the right to be forgotten laws though; I have a gut feeling that you can have your profile deleted and the leftover URLs and permalinks just go to 404 or other kinds of placeholders.
Yes. If you think about it, the individual is being subjected to a man in the middle attack, cleaving a creator from their creation via the use of consent agreements for providing a platform. Rent seeking.
One could argue trying to ensure the guy isn't able to continue doing this to other people is a public service. This is not someone who tried to rip him off, this is someone who has ripped thousands of people off as a business model. And it doesn't even just impact other online course developers, as the prevalence of this behavior might lead course developers not to offer money back guarantees or refunds.
The unfortunate reality of online crime, is the likelihood that he ever faces real legal repercussions for his actions is pretty small.
If you are a hosting service and one of your clients publishes illegal content (perjury, child pornography, etc.) then either of two things happen:
1) If your client gets sued or investigaded for said content and you don't have their credentials, you are held responsible for the content they publish. You go to court and you get fined/arrested and forced to remove the content.
2) If you have your client's identifiable information then 2a) the client goes to court and he is fined/arrested and forced to delete che content 2b) if the client used fake credentials (fake passport, stolen credit card etc.) and you prove your good faith then you are only forced to take down the content.
How long until we get a DMCA-like law preventing these kinds of blog posts? He'd be guilty of trafficking in technology which aids in the circumvention of profit-enhancing business practices.
I don't find his affiliate marketing play shady. He made websites advertising shared passwords to paid porn sites that just got people to the porn sites lol. To me thats no different than those discount sharing websites simply pivoting to affiliate marketing websites. Simply saying “but the porn version is shady” isnt strong enough of an argument to me.
And the image and likeness lawsuits are not unique to his properties.
1. As they are also host the content, I doubt their contracts are signed without knowing who will be hitting their servers. (How do you think they knew some random party was pulling from their servers?)
2. Seeing as they're a small start-up, the bro-grammers can do jsut fine without business and marketing. Which cannot be said about business and marketing doing well without bro-grammers.
3a. Who cares about what Peter Noone thinks?
3b. I agree, the DMCA is notice is plain silly, they should
have sued them outright as per breach of the issuing contract.
The other potential possibility/issue that I would be uncomfortable with, would be a bad actor visiting and then seeding my content. Say someone also seeding or just locally having child pornography or some other nefarious thing, and now they are also an aggregator for your non-nefarious content. Just the possibility of that type of potential unintended association gives me pause in terms of considering it for a blog or whatever else.
Hmmm. Inclined to agree if you replace the company in this argument with a person.
Very disinclined in actuality, since this is a company providing a service to people who have handed over custody of their personal data (It sounds like very high-value data! Cooking videos aren't easy to make!) under the assumption that they will get something out of the deal, i.e., the videos would be hosted and they would be warned if they were going to be deleted (or at least apologized to if they were deleted by accident and not lied to).
>>> If you can’t think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you’ve got is “we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid”, this post already does so and without doxxing them.
Hmm, how about "we should hold them up as an example for users to avoid".
Doxxing doesn't exist for corporations, it only exists for individual people. The proper term of art here is whistleblowing or journalism. And the reason the author avoided mentioning the company name is probably to cover someone's ass who signed an NDA.
How is asking them not to demon click, and editing out innocent comments about having done so, a 'look the other way' attitude? Although I'm unsure exactly what encouragement he was offering without seeing a screenshot of his members-only page, from his overall tone I'd guess it was very general, 'support your favorite site' in nature.
You are right that he was careless and didn't look after his own business interest by studying the contract carefully and thinking through the implications of such statements. If Google had mailed him saying 'look, [Content] at [page URL] is undermining our agreement' then I'd have no argument with it - and I don't think he would either. It's true that accommodating people this way eats into Google's overheads and can be abused by deliberate fraudsters, so there's an economic cost to doing so which seems to be less than the economic cost of strict mechanical enforcement (in terms of lost content and goodwill). Simply put, cash trumps content so Google is always more likely to side with the advertiser than the content creator who has deployed adsense incorrectly.
However, only lawyers have a keen interest in people's contractual interpretation abilities. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the guy made an honest mistake because he understands cameras a lot better than contracts, and like most people he just skimmed the contract and clicked OK. He's running a pretty minimal business here - it sounds like his total annual revenue from online video is about $45,000, so spending several hours studying contract terms (or paying someone else to do so) is not a very efficient use of his time. He generates quality content doing something he enjoys, and is able to make a minimal living doing so - as someone else said upthread, he was pursuing a win-win strategy for everyone, including his advertisers. So work with me for a moment in considering the possibility that he was not a fraudster.
He says he has about 700 subscribers now and has built up to adding ~120/month, 150 sailing videos in HD, and about 1 click per 200 video-minutes, for a median CTR of 6%. New members will of course spend a day or a whole weekend browsing his library (probably looking for footage of places they live/d or sail themselves), but we can figure that any spikes in ad traffic will come after posting of a new video. 6% of 700 subscribers clicking on an ad is...42 per ad. The 6% is certainly high, but given the extremely specialist nature of his sailing website you'd expect a somewhat greater yield. My personal ad responsiveness is heavily skewed towards sites offering specialist content that I'm interested rather than general-interest ones. Anyway, if there were 3 ads in the adsense box and they all got a 6% CTR, that's 126 clicks per video. As there is a time overhead to video production, that's happening at most a few times a week (for short videos), more typically a few times a month. He mentions getting about 30k hits/month from the sailing site, which is consistent with ~700 people watching 1 or 2 videos a day. At a median 6% CTR that's about 1800 clicks per month. Now we can't be sure how much this amounts to for him or for his advertisers; I'm sure it's yielding more than the YouTube content does (for obvious reasons), but his statement that the bulk of the adsense income comes from YouTube seems quite reasonable. I'm guessing that the most adsense revenue that could be coming from his sailing website is about 10% of the total, maybe $200/mo.
Some of that is legit traffic; maybe $100/month is the result of over-enthusiastic supporters who click on every ad as a matter of habit, out of a total adsense payout in the region of $2000/mo., the bulk of which comes from mass-appeal videos on YouTube over which the guy has zero influence. So in the worst case, Google sees a ~5% discrepancy in the revenue being earned by a content creator with two subject categories, each of which have 100+ video offerings. Suspecting a ~5% overpayment, they withhold all payments for the previous quarter - apparently extrapolating the margin of the overpayment to the lifetime traffic of the sailing site - and cut off the relationship completely. Although their contract allows them to do this without explaining why, and there are good reasons for them to have that option available, the result is a loss of about 40% of the guy's annual income. As described, that economic hit may well be greater than his overhead in operating the boat and producing the sailing videos, so even with steady growth in subscriptions and their ancillary revenue (amazon ads), it'll take a good 6 months - 1 year to rebuild that income stream.
That's a very big kick in the teeth to give someone because you think there's a 'risk' they're not using Adwords in the intended fashion, even though the benefit they may have derived (and conversely, the potential loss to your advertisers) is marginal at best. Unless he was putting a 'don't forget to click hint hint' statement on every new sailing video posting, his moral failure is surely limited to that fraction of his pages where he has made such an exhortation. And even if he made no such exhortation, some 'loyal fans' are going to click on every ad to support the site anyway, unbidden. I've done it - not on any significant scale, but in hopes that it brings in a little extra revenue for a site I like, maybe 10 clicks once a week. Users sometimes drive each other to do the same thing, eg by leaving comments visible to others, which may stay up for a day or even several days (quite likely in the case of a person living on a sailboat part-time).
The absurdity that would result if you took Google's contract terms to their logical conclusion would content creators pro-actively studying analytics to understand their user behavior and throttling their access or hiding ads if they seemed like they were supporting the site too consistently or encouraging other users to do so too explicitly (people on web forums sometimes respond to advertisers they dislike by encouraging others to click heavily and increase the advertiser's cost of doing business). Of course Google doesn't want people to do that, and hiding ads from some users might violate the adwords agreement in other ways. But over-rigid enforcement of the 'no encouragement' terms creates an incentive for such behavior.
When I operated a small Cloud platform I discovered a small Malaysian company was using my servers to host their videos in lieu of securing their own, paid, hosting provider.
I tried to contact the operators of the sites that were embedding the content, as it was a clear violation of the TOS.
They never replied and I never took the videos down, partly because I was flattered and partly because of the work they had put into getting the videos up. It was probably a couple hundred GB worth of video. It took weeks for them to setup and dozens of accounts. Either they automated the process or they had some poor guy just uploading videos all day. I never found out.
My point is, I could easily have simply redirected that traffic to a page informing the visitor what was going on. I suspect that is probably what's going on here.
It's not a scandalous example or anything, but it is representative of the fact that webmasters can't wrap their heads around "people will block things that degrade their experience, and if you can't make money in such an environment then it's your problem".
He's part of the problem, although granted, the problem is minor on a cosmic scale.
I doubt the consequences are an expression of shock, it seems far more likely it's just a way to protect your brand's reputation (like we've previously seen with advertisers on YouTube). If that's the case I find it doubtful he'll find it easy to benefit from his old contacts until this blows over.
Unless he's literally recording himself in his room and uploading to his website, he needs people to work with him. And even then he'd still be a the whim of a hosting company.
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