June 19, 2021 | The Biz

MindGeek faces civil suit and regulation

One of the biggest names in porn, MindGeek, is dealing with two pieces of bad news this week. The Montreal-based company owns many adult sites, including Pornhub and gay porn paysites Men.com and Sean Cody.

In Canada, the government has released its long-awaited report on "Protection of Privacy and Reputation on Platforms such as (MindGeek owned) Pornhub."

The report is the culmination of several parliamentary hearings, which included anti-porn activists, lawyers and Canadian MindGeek execs. Industry website XBiz claimed that sex workers, initially not invited to the hearings, were included but effectively muzzled; the site also added that the hearings were run by the more anti-porn members of Parliament, like "Christian activist" Arnold Viersen.

Fourteen recommendations were released as part of the report, including: holding companies responsible for failing to quickly remove anything showing the abuse of minors, non-consensual activity, and content that did not have the full consent of all participants; to make "proof of consent" mandatory for uploaders; and to provide victims a way to have content quickly removed.

Internet service providers may also be more liable for monitoring the content that is being uploaded, though this would certainly run afoul of privacy advocates.

The government did not want to come off as anti-sex, adding that “the goal of the Committee in conducting this study was in no way to challenge the legality of pornography involving consenting adults or to negatively impact sex workers.”

The government has yet to indicate how and if it plans to act on the report.

At the same time, MindGeek has been named in a civil lawsuit that was filed in California. Also named: CEO Feras Antoon, company officers David Tassillo and Corey Price, investors and even credit card company Visa.

A total of 34 women are claiming they were “human trafficked” by the company because of allegedly illegal videos uploaded by third parties onto sites like Pornhub. The human trafficking angle is important as it is the same kind of language used to successfully bring down sites like Backpage.com.

However, safe harbor protections set out in Section 230 may be difficult for plaintiffs to overcome, as it shields websites from liability for the content uploaded by others.

According to free speech group Electronic Frontier Foundation: "[Section 230] says that ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider’ (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of ‘interactive computer service providers,’ including basically any online service that publishes third-party content."

This will certainly be a legal fight to watch, with far reaching ramifications.

You can read a more in-depth review of the lawsuit at XBiz here.