Animal porn, Homemade Videos, and Copyrighted Material

Saturday, March 24, 2018 5:16 AM

by M. Jenny Edwards 

March 23, 2018

Animal porn is quite prevalent among practitioners of bestiality. Individuals take “selfies” with their animal partner, or film someone else to memorialize the event; couples do the family dog for their own sexual pleasure and then post their home-made porn online, sometimes for money. There are clips and bloopers and images that have been passed around for years. // And there are sites that will host digital images for you – sometimes free and sometimes not. Hosting sites like Facebook or Flickr typically have “rules” about what you can post; sometimes you know about those rules and sometimes you don't. Sites often have moderators who review and remove rule-breaking content like bestiality or child porn, or anything that is copyrighted to someone other than the poster.  Sometimes they will tell you they're removing the content, and sometimes they won't.

Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a decision on such a case. In a nutshell, Motherless (a company that hosts porn that users upload) allowed content uploaded by a user that turned out to be copyrighted by Ventura (a company that produces porn). Instead of sending Motherless a takedown notice, Ventura sued Motherless for copyright infringement. Motherless removed the content and filed a motion for summary judgment. An MSJ is a request that the lawsuit has not merit and should be dropped. If the motion is granted, the suit may be dropped, or the court can issue judgment immediately without going through the trial process. In this case the MSJ was granted, but Ventura appealed, but lost in this recent decision. 

The ruling basically found that Motherless did the right thing by removing the copyrighted content, and the fact that it did not have a written policy covering a situation like this one, was irrelevant. Read more about the decision.