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The civil complaint alleges that Pornhub parent company MindGeek, one of the largest online pornography companies, is a "classic criminal enterprise" with a business structure created to monetize nonconsensual sexual content — allegations Pornhub denies.
The suit was filed by Brown Rudnick LLP on behalf of 34 alleged victims of sexual exploitation, including minors, rape and human trafficking, and is seeking damages and protection for plaintiffs.
MindGeek owns over 100 pornographic websites , production companies and brands including Pornhub, RedTube, Tube8 and YouPorn. Among its various platforms, the company amasses 3.5 billion views per month, the lawyers said in a press release.
Michael Bowe, the lawyer representing the alleged victims, said on a conference call with reporters that the online pornography industry "has operated like an old-school red-light district of commerce where rules that do apply and should be applied haven't been applied."
"This is a case about rape, not pornography," the complaint reads.
The women accuse Pornhub of profiting from videos posted without their consent. The complaint includes just one named defendant. The other 33 women requested anonymity.
One anonymous plaintiff on the call said that a video posted of her on Pornhub ruined her life.
"It is time for the companies and individuals who have profited off of nonconsensual and illegal content be held liable for their crime," the plaintiff said. "I joined the lawsuit because I seek justice for myself and the countless victims who don't come forward."
In a statement to CNN Business, Pornhub said it is reviewing and investigating the complaint. While it "takes every complaint regarding the abuse of its platform seriously, including those of the plaintiffs in this case," it denies the accusations about the company's structure.
"The allegations in today's complaint that Pornhub is a criminal enterprise that traffics women and is run like 'The Sopranos' are utterly absurd, completely reckless and categorically false," Pornhub wrote.
Bowe said he is hopeful that the case will be "a watershed moment" for the online pornography industry, which "simply hasn't been policed enough," he said.
The suit is the latest in a series of allegations against Pornhub and MindGeek.
In December, Mastercard ( MA ) , Visa ( V ) and Discover ( DFS ) blocked customers from using their credit cards to make purchases on Pornhub after a New York Times column accused the site of showing child abuse and nonconsensual sexual behavior. Pornhub has denied those allegations, calling them "irresponsible and flagrantly untrue."
Following this action, Pornhub implemented new safety policies on its platform in December. The new policies ensured that only verified uploaders can post to the site, videos on the site cannot be downloaded, and promised a transparency report , among other changes. In February, the site introduced further measures for verification, moderation and detection.
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Updated 0936 GMT (1736 HKT) June 18, 2021
New York (CNN Business) Dozens of women sued Pornhub and its parent company Thursday, alleging that the site knowingly profited from videos depicting rape, child sexual exploitation, trafficking and other nonconsensual sexual content.
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Some are far less chaste than you might expect from porn of yore, and definitely not safe for work.
Leslie Katz leads a team that explores the intersection of tech and culture, plus all manner of awe-inspiring science, from space to AI and archaeology. When she's not smithing words, she's probably playing online word games, tending to her garden or referring to herself in the third person.
If your idea of good porn involves a randy dandy macking on matrons of the local haberdashery, loosen your bow ties and unfasten your corsets. Things are about to get steamy in the drawing room.
For its new Remastered project (warning: link leads to NSFW images), adult streaming-video website Pornhub has, with the help of AI, restored and colorized a series of vintage erotic films, some going back more than 100 years, and posted them online.
"These films show us that human sexuality was alive and well in the early 1900s," Pornhub says.
It's a fascinating romp through erotic history that's by turns charming, funny, artful and eye-opening.
The collection of 20 films spans the late 19th century to the 1940s. Some of the earlier offerings are pretty chaste. For example, in The Undressing, from 1896, a Victorian woman dares to show her naked feet. In The Hairdresser, from 1905, a woman styles her tresses, topless, looking like a classical painting come to life.
But later films are far less restrained than one might expect of ye olde sexy times -- and definitely not safe for (most) work. As early as the 1920s, the films show voyeurism, bondage, spanking and cosplay. There are sex toys, same-sex interludes, threesomes, foursomes and more-somes.
Long before the sexual revolution, it turns out, porn stars in petticoats engaged in a lot of the familiar erotic endeavors you'd see in adult films film today. "People don't often consider the prevalence of erotic films back then, but they were quite the commodity," Pornhub says.
In flagrante delicto, in the last century.
Still, the footage is unmistakably vintage, with jumpy cuts and very little narrative structure. These short films, mostly from France, get straight to business.
In The Horny Haberdashery, from 1921, a male customer is hardly in the door before he drops his neatly pressed trousers to join two female workers engaged in maneuvers that would greatly concern today's HR.
In Surprised by the Guard, from 1930, a French farm girl is doing laundry outside when a soldier suddenly saunters up through the trees. It's immediately clear he's interested in more than having his coat cleaned. So is the next soldier who shows up to, well, enlist.
Adult movies date back to the beginning of motion pictures, when porn films were mostly anonymously produced and known as "stags." The earliest surviving porn movie is believed to be 1896 French film Le Coucher de la Mariée . It stars Louise Willy doing a tame striptease for her new husband as he slyly peeks and giggles from behind a dressing divider. Pornhub includes that early film in its Remastered series, renaming it Bedtime for the Bride.
Almost all stag productions were silent and black and white, even as the film industry adopted sound and color.
"This stylistic device contributed to the films' explicit allure," explains New York's Museum of Sex , "suggesting the reality of the sex acts being performed, as well as the underground and illicit nature of the pornographic film industry itself."
Since standard deep-learning models are trained using safe-for-work images, PornHub turned its AI on its library of 100,000 adult videos and images for a lesson in detecting body parts that take top billing in erotic films. Once the AI had colorized the black-and-white films, the team increased image stabilization, reduced flicker and increased the speed of the film to 60 frames per second. They added audio tracks, like player piano music typical of silent movies, that crescendo in all the right places.
"We thought it was important to not only preserve but modernize these films," Pornhub said. The relics will likely be a turn-on to porn and history buffs alike.
In 1896 French film Le Coucher de la Mariée, which Pornhub renamed Bedtime for the Bride, the groom gets a striptease on his wedding night.
The giant tube site turns 15 this month.
Pornhub is one of the most-visited websites in the world.
Credit: Bob Al-Greene / Mashable
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Before the emergence of "tube sites," websites where users upload often-pirated porn for others to stream, viewers usually bought DVDs or subscriptions to watch their favorite content. Then, in 2005, several PayPal employees founded YouTube , allowing non-tech experts to easily upload and share videos.
It didn't take long for the adult industry to start using the same technology. Two years later, founders of the porn studio Brazzers started Pornhub , and thus began a shift in how people consume — and create — porn. Fifteen years later, Pornhub remains the king of the tubes. It was the eighth most trafficked website in the world in December 2021 according to Semrush, sandwiched between Reddit at #7 and Walmart at #9 — and the only adult site in the top 15, with over a billion visits that month alone.
Pornhub no doubt irrevocably changed the industry by making porn viewing and creation more accessible — yet maintains a complicated relationship with performers and producers, according to experts.
Pornhub, which didn't respond to multiple requests for comment, wasn't the first tube site. RedTube and YouPorn both preceded it in 2006, as New York Magazine reported in a 2011 deep dive into Pornhub and the proliferation of free porn. Nonetheless, these places fundamentally changed the industry because, for the first time, viewers were able to watch free porn on a massive scale.
Before tubes, studios dominated porn creation; they produced and distributed porn on their own websites, or through DVDs. Tubes then received ire from these performers and producers in studios because they pirated content and flouted copyright, said Mike Stabile, representative for the Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry lobby group. There was pirating before tubes, but it exploded with these sites.
Another invention that ushered in this new era was the iPhone, also first-released in 2007. Now, not only did people have screens that fit in their hand — perfect for doing other activities with the free hand — but they also had cameras, too (though some pre-iPhone cellphones had cameras as well).
If Pornhub wasn't the first tube, why is it the household name it is today?
It could be because of the savvy dealings of the people behind the scenes, said Maggie MacDonald, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto studying porn platforms.
While other studios decried the existence of tubes, founders of the studio Brazzers created Pornhub themselves. One founder even wrote that content pirates "will not steal it and get away with it" in an online forum — after Pornhub already launched, condemning the exact move he made, New York Magazine reported.
Three years later, in 2010, businessman Fabian Thylmann purchased Pornhub as part of the corporate conglomerate Manwin; the name later changed to MindGeek. Manwin/MindGeek went on to scoop up many tubes (including RedTube and YouPorn , in addition to Pornhub) and studios (including Digital Playground, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody , among others).
A reason behind these acquisitions, Stabile explained, was that studios were suffering financially (due to piracy and copyright issues). MindGeek knew that they had a massive amount of traffic from free content, and that a percentage of those viewers would ultimately buy subscriptions to watch what wasn't uploaded to the tubes. Pornhub became a traffic partner for studios, many also owned by MindGeek.
"They're often seen as a company that really destroyed the studio system," said Stabile of MindGeek. "At the same time, they are also the largest studio there is."
MindGeek is such a big conglomerate that some call it a monopoly . This leaves performers with limited options. As performer Tasha Reign told ABC in 2014, "I kind of have to shoot for them...because they own almost everything." Even independent producers may have to create content in tandem with what's popular on Pornhub, because that's what sells, said MacDonald.
Neither Stabile nor MacDonald agreed with that labeling, though, as Pornhub and its parent company do have competitors (such as OnlyFans). MacDonald, however, called it an oligopoly: a market with few dominant players.
In recent years, the ability to monetize your own content as an independent creator — or your own time as a "gig economy" worker — has led to a boom in both SFW and NSFW markets. One of the biggest sites in the latter is OnlyFans. Pornhub "laid the groundwork for OnlyFans," said Stabile, "with products like Modelhub , which allows individual models to sell content and sell subscriptions."
"Now with Pornhub, everyone can create content," said performer Valentina Bellucci , who's uploaded content to the site for around two years. "I see a lot of independent models who are extremely successful."
Not everyone sees extreme success on the tube, though. Bellucci herself sees Pornhub as more of a promotional tool than a moneymaker. With the ability to upload content so accessible, there's a lot of competition from other models.
"For the average sex worker, no, [Pornhub's] not the ideal," said performer Brie Nightwood . Nightwood's also the co-founder of platform Unlocked XX , which she calls more sex worker-friendly than OnlyFans due to fewer restrictions on content (whereas OnlyFans banned certain kink and fetish terms ).
Bellucci said she makes more money from videos on XVideos, another tube site, but said she's not going to stop uploading on Pornhub anytime soon because of the exposure.
Nightwood also said some models are on Pornhub for exposure rather than money. She herself has never uploaded to Pornhub in her five years in the industry, citing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. In 2020, MindGeek had around 13,000 reports of illegal material like CSAM according to a report by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), an anti-porn lobbying group. Facebook, by contrast, had over 20 million reports.
In late 2020, the New York Times published an opinion piece about CSAM on Pornhub . Many people Nightwood knew fled the platform. "I definitely didn't want to join it at that point," she said, but she did acknowledge that the platform took down illegal content and made attempts to be safer. After the Times published the piece, Pornhub made a sweeping ban of non-verified content and purged millions of videos as a result.
Still, she wouldn't join now. "The money is so much better monetizing [videos] via OnlyFans," she said.
Pornhub not only changed how people entered and worked within the industry, but it also changed the content itself.
MacDonald pointed to the structure of oligopolies, which aren't unique to porn. Take the music industry for example. "It doesn't matter if Spotify isn't technically a monopoly if their subscription service model becomes what…the user base wants to keep seeing," said MacDonald. "And so the same is true with porn."
There's a convention to the type of video that succeeds on Pornhub: a few minutes long, say five to seven minutes, with the inclusion of several sexual acts. Anyone who's browsed the site can tell the look and feel of a popular Pornhub upload as well, with well-lit shots and crisp audio.
"All of those things are absolutely under the influence of the big porn sites," said MacDonald. "[Creators] do have to adhere to the stylistic standards that Pornhub is setting in the industry." Performers who want to do more avant garde scenes may find that the money doesn't follow because it doesn't follow Pornhub convention.
While the ability to create porn has become more streamlined thanks to Pornhub and OnlyFans, there's still stigma in the profession — as evidenced, partly, by the stamping out of sexual content by legislation, tech companies, and credit card companies. Stabile believes Pornhub normalized co
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