Slashdot Mirror
Paypal Forces E-Book Publisher To Censor Erotic Content
hey! writes "On February 18 of this year, global giant payment processor PayPal sent eBook publisher Smashwords an ultimatum: if Smashwords didn't remove all eBooks with certain erotic content from its catalog in the next several days, PayPal would immediately stop handling payments. Smashword's TOS already precluded child pornography, but now PayPal wants them to also censor depictions of consenting, non-related adults acting out incest fantasies. Likewise, fantasy novels in which human characters transform into non-humans are affected if those characters have sex. ZDNet has a summary of the impact of these changes, which would among other things ban Vladmir Nabokov's Lolita. As outrage mounts, finger pointing is in full swing. Smashwords blames PayPal, and PayPal blames the banks it deals with. The crux seems to be that erotica buyers have a higher rate of 'chargebacks' — customers who buy stuff then demand their money back. Fair enough, but is a customer really more likely to return a book because it depicts one kind of fantasy between consenting adults vs. another? Perhaps the problem is just the quality of writing."
Note: as you can probably tell from the summary, the linked articles (while factual in nature) discuss subjects that may not be suitable for workplace reading.
It's not enough that you want unfettered access to remove funds at whim from my bank account. Now you want to decide what I read too? Yet another reason to NOT use Paypal ever...
Likewise, fantasy novels in which human characters transform into non-humans are affected if those characters have sex.
Please?
Check your premises.
OK PayPal, make sure you return funds to their source if you are unwilling to process the transaction.
Betcha they won't
Shit like this is basically thinly veiled bigotry. It usually starts with this, but then they come for gay romance, trying to get rid of every type of romance they don't like. Y'know, because anything that isn't heterosexual intercourse between cisgender white people is icky.
Does anyone really doubt that if you purchased a book that fantasizes incest.. and ANYONE else finds out about it, the first words from your mouth are: "my card was stolen"
And we might not be talking about a huge increase. Virtually all merchant accounts say they can drop you if your chargeback rate is above 1%. So the real question is, will 1% of people lie about their purchase of incest-fantasizing books? Definitely.
PayPal wants them to also censor depictions of consenting, non-related adults acting out incest fantasies.
Someone better tell George Martin not to use Paypal.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Wow.
I recently read a bunch of werewolf fantasy-erotica stuff from Smashwords It was actually pretty damn vanilla and seemed to be targeted towards sexually inexperienced female teens/young adults. Sex only took place in human form.
This would be banned according to these rules, yet I've read far more graphic and dark/disturbing stuff that would be considered OK.
Are PayPal and associated banks owned by religious puritans now?
Everybody switch to bitcoin and put these losers outta business!
Do not use paypal for anything at all, ever. This was made abundantly clear what, 10 years ago?
No sympathy from me.
Down with this sort of thing!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And Shakespeare.
A Midsummer's Night's Dream anyone?
Check your premises.
I deleted my Paypal account six outrages ago.
Every week I read about how some small business got burned by Paypal. However I have yet to encounter any business willing to drop Paypal and use the competition.
Petitions and strongly worded blog posts will not change Paypal's behavior. Only thing that matters is lost business.
I know that this is a common theme here and it's used way too much here, but this is a case where you can and have to vote with your feet.
This meme is popular at slashdot but I don't personally always buy it. Too many corporations have too much control of the marketplace. Paypal/ebay itself has too much control in how ebay auctions are paid for and in terms of online auction you don't really have a great group of alternatives when it comes to online auctions with a big audience. But this is porn. It's a commodity. It's descriptions of variations of the same group of actions. With this you can tell paypal to shove it and go with someone that really wants your business.
When asked to comment, Paypal representatives responded, "If you don't like it, you can yiff in Hell".
It would certainly be a difference.
Friends had their CC number copied some how and got home to find $3,500 in pr0n charges were suddenly on it. Guess it got passed around a bit or something. They got the charges dismissed, but it took them months.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Seems like this is just the kind of break Dwolla needs to bring some much needed competition to the PayPal universe.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The pron industry always had problems with chargebacks, e.g. on credit cards. Some say that the numbers get as high as 40% .
So, yes it is probable that people buying tentacle rape novels do have a higher tendency to do chargebacks.
Perhaps people (women? I have no idea what the target demographic for literary porn is -- I'm a consumer of the visual media myself) aren't expecting heavy bitch-on-whelp action when they buy the book. How clearly is the content explained beforehand? That might be part of the problem.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Have gnu, will travel.
It's the fact that, once you've finished rubbing one out, there's really no more reason to pay for erotica.
At least, not for a couple of hours...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The Song of Ice and Fire series is fine, because it's not "non-related adults acting out incest fantasies" ... it's actual incest!
When it's two consenting adults? If you've ever been separated from a parent or sibling due to adoption, etc. and are reunited; you may very well have strong sexual feelings for each other. It's a fact, and it's well studied. It's a shame it's so taboo to talk about. Even in a supposedly intellectual setting like slashdot.
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm pretty sure there was some incest in the bible somewhere, especially considering that whole "we're all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve" thing...
This is why we have, and need, Bitcoin. Seriously.
But such a solution would not be a GOOD solution. The proposed solution is far worse than the crime a few people have committed.
Similarly, Pay Pals' actions are far worse than the complaint of higher charge backs.
Here, I have another solution: Figure out how many charge backs are common in a single year. Add one to that number, call it "the C Limit". Pay pal simply states that any book that has reached it's C limit can not be paid for using Pay Pal.
But that means actual WORK has to be done by Pay Pal.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
PayPal
Thankfully, it will have no effect on A Song of Ice and Fire... for you see, the two of which you speak are actually related.
He's donated a shitload of money to Ron Paul's Super PAC.
Some freedom lover.
Did they also request removal of works with aliens who turn into humans and have sex with real humans?
It's been used in a Hollywood movie.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
wait, i might be misreading your syntax but how do "non-related" adults act out the "incest"?
There are many things you are not allowed to accept money for on PayPal. Most of them are illegal, but some, like guns and erotica, are not. But I do remember in PayPal's TOS that they did exclude sellers from taking payments for adult material.
So yeah, don't take PayPal and then complain because YOU didn't follow the rules.
However I will grant that the definition of what is, and isn't 'erotica', could be subject to wild swings of interpretation. However any merchant with enough volume has their own merchant account and doesn't need PayPal anyhow, so shouldn't need to worry about PP's interpretation.
Until PayPal is regulated by the federal government as a bank properly (which they are, de facto) only an idiot would do business with them.
Look what happened to insex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insex (wikipedia)
There is plenty of erotic literature for free on the net in the first place. Second why not use your cc directly? I killed my Paypal-account last year because they changed their policy once again (in their advantage of course). Plus their attitude against Wikileaks reason enough to end relations with them.
"Perhaps the problem is just the quality of writing."
Or perhaps it's what happens when a person has spent money and then is "finished" and wants the money back.
It's not specifically writing that is targeted by this policy, it is anything sex related. Often people would use paypal to sign up to porn sites and when they were done, dispute the charges because they were dissatisfied or just downloaded all the content and didn't want to pay the cash.
Paypal is a private company and should be able to do what it wants. If you don't want to use it, there are tons of alternatives...
Log into paypal, contact us, there are no good topic sub topics so I chose Business Solutions/Other Business Resources to log a complaint. I suggest you do the same if you feel they should hear from the community
It has an incestuous brother selling his pre-teen sister (after some rather violent fondling and other forms of abuse) to a Mongolian horde style war chief.
Which is probably about right for the pre-industrial / quasi-pre-literary society being described.
But also probably offensive to many, and probably against the pay-pal (and Amazon, for that matter) TOS.
Check your premises.
I hate to defend anything PayPal does - but they're absolutely telling the truth here: their partner banks are complaining (for whatever stupid, arbitrary reason), and they risk having those accounts closed (read: kill the company) if they don't stop providing merchant services for the seller in the article. One of the things that screws you over when you're only pretending to be a bank.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see paypal refuse to comply with their partner banks and get shut down, but we all know that's not going to happen. There's a ton of stupid things they do that are certainly their fault, but this is (based on my own experience with bitchy partner banks) not one of them.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Sounds like someone's just not a Twilight fan. That could be the basis of this whole thing lol.
People who buy porn have more chargebacks because the companies that sell porn tend to be bigger scumbags than other companies. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of porn related chargebacks are the result of either not getting an item you paid for or getting something that has been substantially misrepresented.
What about selling the christian bible? Why do they get a free pass to depict consenting (and non-consenting) non-related (and related) adults (and children) performing incest and other sexual acts.
I'm pretty certain there is even a story of a guy who has sex and later turns from a human to non-human, although I can't recall right now which.
Technically it is also in the wrong order (sex then change to non-human, not change to non-human and then have sex)
We already know PayPal wants to ban all the classic literature, as well as any and all literature not sold through a publisher house that is one of their customers... But I want to see them piss off the entire nation of Christians!
*grabs the popcorn to watch*
I left Paypal about six months ago. I'd never been screwed over by them, but I saw so many other people getting screwed, that I felt why leave myself open like that? Because I have used Paypal to purchase porn in the past.
Leaving and cancelling my account was almost alarmingly easy. Just delete a few things, clean up the history, then click on the "delete account" button. *bink* Done.
No blubbery emails, no phone calls, no nuthin, just a "Thanks" and a slamming door. And I had a merchant account from selling stuff on eBay, too.
I think this is one of those cases where Paypal is making so much money, they honestly don't need to give a shit.
[End Of Line]
Why? They've shown their true colors long ago.
Of course, if you care more about convenience than you do about their censorship and not standing up for what's right if it might cost them a buck, go ahead.
It's your choice. It always was.
Quite a few years ago we used PayPal. It was an era where free software was a few clicks away. You only needed to order it, pay for it. download it and enter a dispute which card companies usually honored but some at least gave you the option to counter the dispute. PayPal did not and if you didn't have money in your account to cover the dispute they cancelled your PayPal account. That was sort of fair enough but PayPal cancelled my business account, my personal account and then went on to cancel my wifes account, the account of my four kids (adults all) and several others that were related apparently to the name Aaron. I've never tried to get a PayPal account since.
Oh Shit, My Wife Found Out
You see the same thing is hotels.
Also could be:
SPMMFG
Society Pressures Made Me Feel Guilty.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are books returnable if I don't like them?
No. All sales are final. This is why most authors allow you to sample much of their book for free so you can try before you buy.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
It apparently contains a lot of inappropriate material.
They would actually have to read the book first to know what's in it.
Keep reading, you picked the wrong two characters. (unless you dropped an 'also' in your first sentence, in which case, disregard).
Capcha is 'corpse', hahahaha... poor House Winterfell.
Bullshit. It's specifically incest, bestiality, and rape. Anything else, OK. Arguments about chargebacks and fraud seem kind of thin when the prohibitions are that specific.
Slashdot is not one person, there are many people with many ideas.
There's just you and one other person (who can type REALLY fast).
... but I didn't speak as it was a private dispute between greedy and sleazy.
Or was it between sleazy and greedy?
In any case: its a private commercial dispute with no infringement on liberty implications. So no 'outrage mounts' from me. Let the courts sort this one out.
Back in the early two thousands, we had V.P. level access to Paypal, because a client of ours was kind of a big deal. It was a multi-million dollar deal -- and Paypal HAD to turn it down. Why? They stoned lipped us at the time and didn't tell us why. We got the story from the V.P. after he left the company later.
You see, Paypal once wanted to be a bank. In order to be a bank, they had to be FDIC insured. And therein lies the hitch. You see, back then, the Bush administration frowned on certain adult orientated entertainment. The US government told Paypal, under no uncertain terms, that if they wanted to even be considered for FDIC insurance, they had to give up all monetary benefits from adult orientated entertainment.
I would speculate that this is less bank or Paypal driven (Banks don't have any problem taking porn money, after all, they just charge the porn companies more for taking it) then it does government driven and Paypal having inked a deal with the US government.
Of course, this is pure speculation and heresy and I'm sure if you asked any of the parties involved, everyone would deny it.
-- MrMud
People want to read all manner of books, including erotica. The Kindle (or the Nook) happens to be ideal for this sort of thing, as there's no lurid cover to titillate passersby, no "plain brown envelope" that turns out to nothing of the kind, no squeamish stockist, mainstream publisher or distributor in the position to decide what is "acceptable" and what it not,and no store clerk to take offense or make snide comments. It's just a book-- not a scarlet letter.
However, a lot of "specialist publishers" have been squeezed by credit card companies, partly because of the chargebacks. It's a pain for honest customers.
and Mastercard. they are the ones that tell the banks how many chargebacks are acceptable, and the ones who set the cost of chargebacks.
I'm sure this has been asked on previous /. PayPal horror posts, but...
Does anyone know of a good alternative to PayPal? As far as function goes, PayPal works really well for me. It allows me to easily buy and sell things on bricklink.com (a LEGO marketplace), it has a worldwide acceptance that pretty much ensures compatibility with the user on the other of the transaction, and it handles currency conversions.
Of course, all the moral side of things, PayPal blows. So is there an alternative? Or am I to continue bending over, taking it in the ass, and then thanking them for the privilege afterwards?
im not sure how much credence i put in this story. big investment banks have always been huge customers of prostitutes, and hell the NYMEX even had traders who started out as prostitutes.
the big porn industry is not little guys fighting for free speech, its companies like Hughes Aircraft which owned certain satellite TV companies which made huge profits off of pornography. every cable provider makes big bucks off of pornography. they use ordinary banks just like everyone else. pay per view porn is big money. esp in hotels. the VISA system processes their payments like everyone else.
im not saying its impossible that they cold-shouldered paypal over this issue, im just saying i need alot more evidence to convince me that this is what happened.
This isn't something new or arbitrary, Paypal has an Acceptable Use Policy and sexual material isn't accepted:
That of course doesn't make it any better, it shouldn't be Paypals business what people are buying over their system.
as you can probably tell from the summary, the linked articles (while factual in nature) discuss subjects that may not be suitable for workplace reading.
We are talking about reading things on the workplace. Reading this from a secular country, this advice sounds like something you would post in Pakistan or Indonesia.
Is your boss really allowed to filter the ideas that are allowed to arrive to your brain ? If so it may be time to, maybe, I don't know, revolt ? Change job ? Organize your life differently ? Emigrate ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Nope. I know the bible better than most Christians, and there is nothing like that in there at all. If you want lots of shapechanging kinkyness, you need to head for the Greek mythology. Zeus alone could (and has) filled books with stories of his meddling in the affairs of mortals.
in which human characters transform into non-humans are affected if those characters have sex.
I do believe Lev Grossman's The Magicians falls in to this category.
The bible would certainly get banned.
But for that matter, the other processors often aren't much better. I know of one that requires sites to have absolutely no references to celebrities in them whatsoever-- not just the prose (or whatever they're selling), but right down to posts on any forums they're running, and probably even the advertisements too.
Hi, Mark Coker from Smashwords here. We've been selling erotica for four years, and I can tell you erotica customers have very few chargebacks. They're good customers. If Visa, Mastercard and Amex try to make that claim, it doesn't hold water. Maybe that holds for pornograph (erotica is not porn) or escort services, but not for ebooks. Our biggest chargeback category the last six months was in self improvement/spiritual enlightenment, where a single individual was using stolen credit cards to purchase ebooks on how to make him a better, happier person. Ironic.
Shapeshifting in the Bible? No.
Incest in the Bible? Genesis 19:30-38.
Only refund for credit to next purchase.
leaves paypal argument toothless.
To be fair, ours was really pushing the limits as it was even without PayPal coming down on this. We couldn't get it on to Amazon at all (despite finding plenty of other similar examples on their store - but I'll try not go with the hipocracy rant).
It would seem now that the corps hold a lot more sway over what we see/do these days than just the governments; or at least the corps have the capacity to enforce the whims - best of all, they don't have to go through the usual legal process, just choose to change and enact.
Pericles?
Nah, you can tell he has only watched the television series.
Greetings and Salutations....
I have not read every comment, so I beg pardon if I am rehashing points already made, also, IANAL - this is all just somewhat paranoid opinion. That having been said, I think that it is a really bad business decision for Paypal to move further away from its original role as a simple, money-transferring service. By involving itself in that censorship, it seems to me that it is taking on partial responsibility for the content. That will open up a huge can of worms, and, expose them to massive liability that could destroy the company in the long run. For example, if they start censoring content with questionable language or sexual content that falls into the extreme areas, then, what happens when other religions and cults put pressure on them to censor content that might reflect badly on THEM (And yes, I am looking at you, Radical Islamists and Scientologists). What happens if the Anti-Abortion groups start pressuring PayPal to censor content that discusses abortion in an objective manner? I am sure we all can come up with other examples where once the door is opened, it is easy to see how the fences will creep slowly in.
The concept of Freedom of Speech (in any form) as expressed in the first amendment to the US Constitution is not there to protect speech that everyone approves of. It is there to protect speech which some folks might find objectionable.
That having been said, I wish there was a viable alternative to PayPal that goes back to the service's original roots - that of inexpensive, easy micro-transactions over the Internet, and, is not willing to evolve into the unregulated bank that PayPal has become.
Pleasant dreams
dave mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
It is things like this that make the USA seem so peculiar to the remaining 96%.
Violence is deemed acceptable - blood and brains are acceptable for everyone because this gets young people aware of the real world. As soon as two consenting adults get sweaty, or part of a woman's breast is seem on national TV for a fraction of a second, all hell breaks loose.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Most of the major religions' prime texts contain acts and references that the Moral Minority would scream blue murder over if they were in a modern book that their children were forced to read at least once a week.
But hey, it's one rule for us, another rule for The Word Of The One True God...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
They act it out. They pretend. That's what acting is.
What about selling the christian bible? Why do they get a free pass to depict consenting (and non-consenting) non-related (and related) adults (and children) performing incest and other sexual acts.
Now obviously it's a subjective judgement, but porn is material designed to provide titillation. Nothing in the Bible is presented as a turn-on, it's all fairly dry and matter-of-fact.
And yes, many people don't understand the difference. Consider that most rape scenes and almost-raped-but-saved-at-the-last-minute scenes in mainstream TV and cinema are indeed played for titillation, and I've often felt very uncomfortable watching them. But then compare with the French film Irreversible, criticised for gratuitous sexual violence, but in fact one of the most disgustingly unerotic films ever made -- which was kind of the point. It was a conscious rejection of the graphic depiction of rape-as-erotica, not of rape-as-subject.
The deviancy in the Bible is subject, not erotica.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
> the bible says there were pre-Adamic people....
> Female humans per se, were created the (allegorical) "sixth day",...
No, it does not.
See: http://bible.cc/genesis/3-20.htm
"And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living."
As Eve's the mother of all living, she would be the mother of these "non-Adamic people" too (unless they were not "living"). This contradicts your assertion that they predated Eve.
This view (that Adam's children intermarried) is supported by mainstream genetics - 'mitochondrial Eve' is the term for the _single_ common female ancestor for all humans, just And 'Y Chromosome Adam' is our _single_ common male ancestor.
See also:http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c004.html ...
The law forbidding marriage between close relatives was not given until the time of Moses (Leviticus 18-20).
Remember that Abraham married his half-sister (Genesis 20:12) . God blessed this union to produce the Hebrew people through Isaac and Jacob. It was not until some 400 years later that God gave Moses laws that forbade such marriages.
Jewish tradition also asserts Adam's sons married his daughters.
"Note: as you can probably tell from the summary, the linked articles (while factual in nature) discuss subjects that may not be suitable for workplace reading."
The typical retarded closed minded American attitude. If you can't read that where every you work, its time to find another place to work.
Or better yet country. That is always a good advice to anybody who want a payment processor who doesn't censor - find someone else.
How about a French payment processor - the French don't mind a bit of skin.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Paypal has policies that prevent it from dealing in certain material (it honestly makes no difference to me if it is Paypal's own policy or one imposed on it by banks) and Paypal is of the opinion that this material violates their policy - and the problem is what, exactly? There is no indication that this policy is being applied inconsistently - aside from an example which the poster cites regarding Lolita being offered for sale by other retailers that accept Paypal.
I look at this as rat parts in hot dogs. If you ask the public how many rat parts would you accept in your hot dog, most would say none, yet many hot dogs have some trace amount of rat in them (maybe on the order of 1 part per million) and the FDA allows that. But if it were to jump to say 1 rat part per 1,000 the FDA would shut down the processing plant.
That's sick. Sick in a puking way.
And people read this shit? I can't get my head around it. What possible reason could there be for this sort of sickness? Even 2,000 years ago this must have been wrong. Wrong. Wrong, Wrong.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
A private company is refusing to support incest porn with its payment system. Cry me a river; I don't care.
And yes I know your grade-school teacher taught you that if they censor anal sex incest cuckold porn today, tomorrow they'll be banning the dictionary and words themselves. Just like in 1984 which the guys in power must not have read.
You don't prove your dedication to free speech and privacy by finding the freakiest and most screwed up test cases to champion.
If you think that's bad, you should read about how our kind, loving god killed every first-born child in Egypt just because their leader wouldn't let go of a bunch of his slaves. Yep, killed kids right in their cribs over a political conflict they had nothing to do with. With a god like that, who needs a Satan?
Seriously, most Jews and Christians have no idea what's really in there. And what they do know is filtered through a bunch of distortions introduced by subsequent religious leaders (often codified in the Talmud and other interpretations). They can quote verse after verse, but they haven't once sat down and considered the big picture, or really took a hard look at the text as an outsider might.
So, as Penn and Teller once observed, religion is really all about picking and choosing the parts of the text you like, and ignoring or downplaying the ones you don't.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's time to censor Paypal. They have just lost one customer. More may follow...
Fair enough, but is a customer really more likely to return a book because it depicts one kind of fantasy between consenting adults vs. another?
If Paypal believes it is risky, can you give some persuasive evidence that it is in Paypal's interest to take the risk? That's the real question, here. We don't have a right to force Paypal to serve us in circumstances they aren't willing to serve in. (And frankly, we might be better off without them, anyway.)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
A company known for being shitty to it's customers is... being shitty?! The amazement! The shock!
Oh no, wait. They do this all the damn time.
Of course they send back their used pr0n - what a bunch of wankers...oh wait...
for the porn industry to start their own private piratepal then ... anyone ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?