Germany: an unpleasant surprise for online porn fans

The following linked story is in French, from the website of France24, an all news station in France.

www.france24.com...

Entre 10 000 et 30 000 Allemands ont eu, ces derniers jours, une bien mauvaise surprise en ouvrant leur boîte aux lettres. Ils ont tous reçu une mise en demeure de payer 250 euros par vidéo classée X regardée sur le site redtube.net.

Note: the site is actually .com, not .net.

What seems to have happened is that between 10 and 30 thousand Germans have received formal notices from a German law firm to pay 250 Euros per x-rated video viewed on the streaming site redtube.com

Many porn fans, like me, will be familiar with either "redtube" or other sites like it. They usually have porn clips taken from longer movies or sometimes entire movies that one can view "streaming" for free.

Sometimes one will click on a link to one of these movies and find that the movie has been removed from the site because of a complaint from the copyright holder. "Members" of these sites will upload the films or shorter clips onto the site's servers for viewing by the general (pervert) public.

The story on France24 tells us that

La pornographie représente près de 12,5 % du trafic Internet en Allemagne [contre 7,34 % en France], d’après le cabinet israélien d’analyse de données SimilarWeb.

According to an Israeli website that analyses internet traffic, 12.5% of all internet traffic in Germany is directed to porn sites (7.34% of French traffic is porn related).

Germany has one of the largest internet markets in Europe and almost 80% of Germans are connected.

Thousands of Germans are trying to figure out what to do about these porn viewing invoices and are also wondering how the law firm got their addresses.

There is speculation about whether redtube gave the addresses to the law firm that sent the invoices or, actually, how the addresses were obtained, whether some sort of spyware was used. Privacy issues are in the forefront of this situation.

Apparently there is also some question of the law concerning "streaming" sites as opposed to P2P download sites. It seems that the judge that may have authorized the use of "spyware" to obtain the addresses of site users in this case may not have fully understood what a "streaming" site is, according to Christian Solmecke, a German lawyer quoted in the story. In German law "streaming" sites are not categorically illegal even for copyright protected material, according to the France24 story.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. I wish some legit journalist would do a story on internet porn and copyright issues to get the views of the porn makers as to whether they intend to follow the lead of other media entities and start going after the little infringers.

It's a little like the recent development in France of a new "john" law which will allow police to charge the customers of prostitutes.

It is interesting that this case involves only one porn streaming site, redtube. It must be seen as a kind of test case when viewed from the porn production side. Targeting the entire German porn viewing public would be a mammoth undertaking worth hundreds of millions of Euros, if successful.

I wonder what exactly is going on with this case. It seems like such an anomaly.

reply to post by ipsedixit


OH!!! This is a huge story - people get to see just what survelliance and taxes mean to them personally -

Wonder how the american public will react to being billed for all of their "free porn" on the internet?

This could be THE revolution.

Outing people and charging them for it......

I wonder how the obozo administration could loop this into "healthcare" and use the IRS to get their refunds, or charge them "income tax", for their "healthcare"?

reply to post by Happy1

Yeah, I think this story is something of a sleeper, unless it is all some kind of mistake by a judge who didn't fully understand the situation. It seems like such an example of selective enforcement of law.

I've never fully understood the free porn tsunami. Maybe the penny is dropping. Paying for it is being grandfathered in Germany.

Similar is going on in Germany for a LOOOOOONG time already, where sleazy lawyers send extortion letters to site owners, for example if they don't have an "impressum", ie. a page with their business information/address etc.

This porn blackmail is just the next step.

Obviously, those lawyers work semi-legal or illegal even obtaining private information from people, their IPs etc.

The irony....I can see many people actually fearfully paying the €250 in such cases where someone doesn't necessarily want someone else in the family know they watched porn. So I can see them simply paying.

I would now want to give the advice that people should email/mail those lawyers back that they can *** ***** (well you know what I mean)....but from what I know the best thing here is to not reply AT ALL. Obviously I am not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice.

reply to post by ipsedixit


I wish I could extort £250 PER porn vid watched - even if I just stuck to people I know - I would rake in a fortune

reply to post by NoRulesAllowed

You are probably right about this. The fact that only one site is involved is something of a tip off that this legal pressure on viewers of the site in question is potentially some sort of fraud.

reply to post by ignorant_ape

Just reading the story gave me chills.

2nd.

Happy1
reply to post by ipsedixit

 

OH!!! This is a huge story - people get to see just what survelliance and taxes mean to them personally -

Wonder how the american public will react to being billed for all of their "free porn" on the internet?

This could be THE revolution.

Outing people and charging them for it......

I wonder how the obozo administration could loop this into "healthcare" and use the IRS to get their refunds, or charge them "income tax", for their "healthcare"?

edit on 14-12-2013 by Happy1 because: (no reason given)

Not just that but "exposing" them too. All those bills for porn and receipts exposing people's porn lifestyle to others. I'm thinking mostly all those men who are into porn but have wives who will not like seeing that bill in the mail.

What seems to have happened is that between 10 and 30 thousand Germans have received formal notices from a German law firm to pay 250 Euros per x-rated video viewed on the streaming site redtube.com

Uh huh.... *eye roll*

reply to post by mOjOm


I agree with you -

On a more serious note - just shows how child porn could be stopped and those involved with making the actual victims could be shut down, apprehended, and - in my opinion, get their just punishment - of execution.

I'm betting that won't happen though.

PS - I am not against consexual pornography between adults.

It seems in fact that spyware has been used to retrieve the IP addresses of visitors to redtube.net unwittingly. This is what emerges from the decision of the judges who authorized Cologne U + C to request access to the Internet the names of subscribers for IP address providers. Impossible, however, whether this is the law firm that was directly use these methods hackers or whether he has obtained these listings from third parties

~ translated section of article

Lol the law firm handing out these notices is obviously some sort of super troll trying to make a quick buck. I would highly recommend that NO ONE pay these ridiculous fines, as soon as some people start paying these fines then it proves this type of scam (yes it is clearly a scam imo) can work and many law firms will start dishing out huge numbers of bogus threats hoping that people will fork over their money out of fear and ignorance of the law.

There's no way for anyone who uses redtube.com to know which of the uploads are legit and which may be violating a copyright. It's exactly the same as YouTube, people upload copyrighted videos all the time but they get taken down fairly quickly (as they do on RedTube). If some people happen to watch one of those copyrighted videos before it gets taken down, it is absurd to try and blame those people when most of them probably didn't even realize it was copyrighted. Obviously the only person who should be at fault is the uploader.

reply to post by ChaoticOrder

I think you've got it. It's like "ambulance chasing" lawyers or almost as if traffic enforcement were privatized so that anyone catching an infraction could issue a ticket, except that there seems to have been an actual judge involved in authorizing the collection of addresses.

If you register with France 24, you can get a daily update in English, or what ever your language is.

I recall the cases in the US of students at Universities and similar places who got letters to pay thousands of dollars for illegally downloading music. In those cases, they were using Uni-based computers and were tracked down that way.

And that makes me wonder: 10,000 to 30,000 Germans sounds like a lot, but it's a very small number compared to the millions who would be using online services to view porn. So, perhaps the people who've received these letters were using similar internet facilities, like Uni computers (or internet), Govt. employees watching stuff while at work (even in their breaks), and so on.

I'm not saying that the lawyers obtained their address lists entirely legally, but it would be much easier for them to get "bulk" lists from major internet end-user locations like I've mentioned above than do it all on an individual, case-by-case basis. And large numbers of letters going out in a relatively short time suggests they got "bulk" lists anyway.

Frankly I think all these lawyers and their clients have done is open a very big can of worms. And some of those worms have teeth and also have friends. It wouldn't surprise me if the lawyers wind up in more trouble than the people they've written to. It's one thing to watch something easily accessible online via streaming, it's quite another to use possibly devious methods to obtain very private, personal information on thousands of people and use it to try and obtain money from them.

sorry, i have to lol!!

it's way too funny.

i call bogus on the fines.

another form of ransom ware.

*German Resident speaking*

This is a scam...DO NOT PAY....DO NOT REPLY.

These things happen all the time here.....Taking advantage of law-abiding citizens.

(Ausserdem ist youp*rn wahrscheinlich besser,bzw günstiger.Würde mir gesagt^^)

reply to post by ipsedixit


I'd be in big trouble if this happened in the US

reply to post by ipsedixit


will they find my address ?

if so ill be up s#@t creek without a paddle

Happy1
reply to post by mOjOm

 

PS - I am not against consexual pornography between adults.

What? ''Consexual'' is not a word, I assume you mean ''consensual'' ?

I think what you mean to say is that you do not oppose legitimate adult pornography. The vast majority
of porn 'actors' are professionals; that they consent is somewhat of a given.

Anywho, if one of these invoices landed on my doorstep it would be completely ignored. Without a copy of the original signed agreement, it is void and should be considered as nothing more than a scam.

Yeah, as everyone said there is absolutely no need nor obligation to answer those "threats".

Being someone who developed and maintained a porn site for several years in the past, I can only tell you that the porn publishers are earning a lot more money with releasing free pornography videos than they did selling VHSs and DVDs back in the day. They would never compromise such a promising market with almost an infinite number of viewers who become aware of their "brand".