the DMCA argument does make sense, from a litigious standpoint. but at this point in the history of publicly-available copywritten content, there’s no moral obligation for a regular DMCA takedown. its almost entirely left up to someone to report it, and not the actions of an active agency. Also there’s WAYYY more content under DMCA protection than porn, so it’s just too monumental of a task to tackle, as opposed to a smaller niche on a set of smaller sites with international users, making any real litigation weirdly difficult.
It’s infinitely easier to rally behind banning loli content because there’s an easily perceived victim to the public. whether or not its legal and abundant in another country, whether or not the argument is sound. Unfortunately, in the US we had a legislative period with a bunch of pearl-clutching conservative hypocrites that hate sex (or the fact they just weren’t getting any), so they have to ruin it for every other free citizen.
to simplify it:
hosting companies might see DMCA content being posted but not think twice, since its just more clicks/site views, and stupid hard to enforce copyright.
but if they see anything even REMOTELY approaching loli/shota, that plug gets pulled so goddamn fast ONLY because of how contested it is. again, risk mitigation, not a moral censorship.
i appreciate the discussion, but i feel like personal preference is fogging the reality of how websites and hosting work.
Do all of you people intentionally ignore the fact that a ton of websites have had loli content for decades and been fine? For fucks sake, look at 4chan.
If you’re getting grief from your hosting provider (which we don’t even know if eroscripts is), then you change provider
Seriously? Flagging my post because you don’t agree with me tells me exactly the kind of people who want this ban. There’s nothing inappropriate about it, I’m not attacking anyone. Shameful behavior.
We have not received any specific threat (yet). But back during the outage times, we had a moment where we felt that we might be forced to switch to official discourse hosting, and they were asking questions about content legality and whatnot. Plus the recent news of hosting sites taking down a bunch of user content.
We originally were okay with this type of content because it was in a legal gray zone, but my opinion has changed that I really don’t want to be taking on all this legal risk upon myself, because again, it is a gray zone. While furry type stuff might be illegal in places, I am much much less worried about that painting a target on my back.
Do other sites exist that have had this content for years? Yes. Do I want to take that legal risk upon myself anymore? No.
I am not trying to appease any particular users here.
Yeah i kinda reread it for a 3rd time right as i pressed reply and realized what it actually meant. The way the text is formatted really confused my small brain. Cant delete my post for some reason.
Maybe this is just me, but I would have been much more supportive of the ban in the first place if you had just told us you were doing it for personal reasons, in this case for your own safety and to mitigate legal risk upon your person. The wording in the original post was kind of ambiguous, honestly.
I completely understand the decision you have taken and will support it fully. Besides, I believe that what you do with this site is your prerogative as the owner.
It’s just that if you had disclosed these reasons earlier to the community, we wouldn’t be having this complete mess discussing legalities and laws and whatever. People will still be unhappy about the decision, of course, but at least people will understand you’re just doing it to protect yourself instead of “1984 censorship” or caving in to the puritans or whatever lmao
The way I understand the response from @hugecat is that he doesn’t want to risk legal trouble, despite the almost non-existent chance of any.
And he’s willing to piss off a substantial portion of the platform to avoid the risk.
That’s fine, I’m still not happy about it, but it’s his decision. Just be upfront about it. The lack of info regarding why the ban was happening in the initial post was ridiculous.
So vague that of course it was gonna cause outrage.
So in a few years, if CG bestiality has the same sort of reputation as loli hentai, it’ll get banned. Right now they’re figuring out the line for what is and isn’t a loli, but that line shifts, and in a few years, those remaining posts will go too if @hugecat deems it’s too risky.
Anything the owners don’t want to deal with will get removed.
That’s certainly not the kind of site I’m gonna support.
Great, it wasn’t even a week and we already have conspiracy theories. At this rate you will blame it on 5g waves by the end of the week.
But seriously, I’m sure this decision was made for a reason, noone is anonymous in the internet and if hugecat and others don’t feel comfortable with some content hosted here they have all the rights to get rid of it. If you are upset you can always create your own site where you host anything you want, stop being childish.
“… a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting…”
“… depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in…”
If loli/shota is deemed as appearing to be a minor engaging in a graphic sexual act, it is addressed by that law. You can argue that it shouldn’t be deemed as such, but the wording of the law certainly gives US courts reasonable means to punish such content.
If the forum criteria is to ban content that mods deem to appear prepubescent, that definitely is in alignment with a visual depiction “that is, or appears to be, of a minor”.
I understand that site administrators are free to decide their policies and what content to ban. I also understand the argument that if someone doesn’t like it, they can create their own site.
I understand that administrators do not want to take on legal risks. If the purpose is to mitigate risk rather than out of a particular preference, have you considered switching to a provider that is not bound by U.S. law? At the very least, you would no longer need to fear the laws created by hypocritical conservatives in the U.S., in my opinion.
I do think moderators would have the gratitude of the majority if they would somehow scold the user(s) frivolously flagging perfectly acceptable replies here.
Edger447’s replies were flagged as off-topic. Much as I enjoyed reading the short essay on psychoanalysis of lolicon script users, I fear this could redirect the discussion back into the endless spiral of morality debate of the subject, so I let it stay hidden.
“Ban media but keep script” was brought up internally a couple of times. It wasn’t accepted in the end as there ought to be some way in the topic to pin back to the media and therefore become difficult to maintain. It wasn’t because the staff are concerned about how the use of Funscript would shift the psychology of the recipient of lolicon art. At least the U.S. code showed less interest in what goes on in the brains of an Otaku than Saito Tamaki.
That’s very fair. The frivolous flags I’m referring to are replies that are back at this point, I have no doubt there have been reasonable flagging in this mess of a topic.
If that’s the case, it needs to be made more clear. This is the first mod communication of loli/shota scripts being banned, and it’s not even a direct statement, it’s implied. All other communication is about the ban of loli/shota “content”, of which the OP goes out of its way to define as visuals, with no mention of scripts, external links, etc. Nobody is going to find this buried 300+ posts deep into a flamewar! (props to you all for leaving the topic open despite this)
I feel like an insane person for having to ask this, but whatever. If it’s ostensibly the topic of the thread, why isn’t there a plain statement explicitly saying that loli/shota scripts are banned? This is a site for sharing scripts, not visuals. How is that not the first point. idgi
We are very up front about piracy in the site. as long as content is hosted off of the forum we dont hold liability. torrent magnets are disallowed for this reason.
magnet links make us liable because P2P protocols has precedent with the pirate bay that magnet links can hold us liable.
Direct downloads have no liability problems if we are not hosting the content. at most we host thumbnails/gifs. and if that was enough for litigation you could persue way bigger fish than us.
I personally have no moral issue with loli content. its not a real child. No one is being hurt. but my opinions dont change US Law.
Here if you’d like to read:
a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct and is obscene.
Accusations about the mods moral compass are immature and dont solve any problems.
