LOS ANGELES — Patreon has admitted its hands are tied as far as stemming the piracy of its paywalled adult content, according to a report in Wired.
Pirate content site Yiff.Party claims to have over 20 terabytes of pirated "porn" material scraped from behind Patreon's paywalls and posted for free.
Wired appears to have employed a loose definition of "porn," given Patreon has been actively suspending the creators of explicit content for at least two years.
"We can’t do anything," Colin Sullivan, head of legal for Patreon, told Wired. "We don’t enforce [copyright] because we don’t have a license to the content."
Dozes, the mononymous owner of Yiff.Party, has given different rationales for why he allows so much pirated material on his website. In a 2018 article on Kotaku, he claimed to be posting the material to "archive content" so that art that disappears from Patreon when creators leave still exists online.
However, in the Wired article he's quoted as saying that he's doing it "simply to make paid Patreon content available for free."
Patreon first reached out to Yiff.Party in July 2018 to draw their attention to the presence of infringing material on the site and followed up in September of that year. According to Dozes, these are the only contacts he's received from anyone with an @patreon email address.
"Patreon has definitely been aware of Yiff.Party since 2015, but that's the only instance of them directly contacting me," he said.
According to Sullivan, Patreon never heard back from Yiff.Party after sending those cease-and-desist notices. In May 2019, Patreon posted a blog laying out their position on pirated material and their lack of power to enforce copyright laws.
"Protecting the works of our creators across the entirety of the internet is not something our policies or enforcement efforts are equipped to handle," wrote Patreon copyright lawyer Weston Dombroski. The blog, in effect, says that because Patreon is only a host, and doesn't own the rights to any of the material on its platform, it is up to individual creators to fight their own copyright battles.
Read the entire Wired article here.
