Re: Adult games's news
Posted: Mon, 18Mar12 11:51
moskys wrote:Frankly, I still don't understand all this bitterness. Their site, their business, their rules. As simple as that.
Not so simple:
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/05/poli ... index.html
They aren't doing anything wrong (although you can always implement your new rules in a better way). But all this criticism based on freedom of speech, legal/illegal content... come on.
See above. Businesses have no right to discriminate between content that's legal.
As I've argued, a case could be made for stories about incest to be perfectly legal, since there is no actual incest taking place. There might even be a lawyer willing to take this to court, but I wouldn't bet on it.
When you rely on a third party for your incomes, you're always at his hands.
Take a basic employee-employer relationship. Who do the employees rely on for their income? Their employer, their employer's bank, or their own bank? According to law, their employer is the sole party responsible for the employee's income. The same way, content creators using Patreon are reliant on their patrons for their income, emphatically not on Patreon's whims.
Companies have the right to change their policies whenever they want. And those changes always have an impact on every stakeholder and may allow new opportunities for some other companies.
Sure. Patreon could change their policy so that starting today, their fees are 100% with zero going to creators, and that it's illegal to leave Patreon and set up elsewhere. Oh, and suck it up, chumps. Hahaha, free money.
Patreon literally tried this the other month, by introducing an extra charge with no prior warning. This was met with serious backlash and only threats forced them to reconsider.
There's this pesky concept called "goodwill" and as a user, you have a legally binding expectation that policies will not change without notice and without due process. Patreon is violating goodwill left and right and they will get replaced, you can expect this.
Mortze wrote:Patreon might suffer business consequences, reputation consequences, but it won't suffer legal consequences for denying any kind of content on their site. And that's the way it should be.
As long as they don't step on the toes of anyone powerful enough or they don't cross any sensitive agenda, they're fairly safe.
Imagine what would happen if they tried to ban homosexual content on their site. "Their site, their rules", you say?
It has come to my knowledge that Incest (along with bestiality, minors depicted sex, necrophilia, non-consensual sex, has always been in their Guidelines, from the start. Patreon just decided to turn a blind eye on games with those themes, or was purely unaware of those games' themes (didn't played the games or checked thoroughly the Patreon pages). Anyway, those in the wrong, from the start, were the creators that violated Patreon's rules on Adult content.
Showing discontentment now that Patreon decided to enforce their INITIAL rules is nothing less than bad-faith.
They added incest to their rules specifically. And I already pointed out that it's not illegal.
Icky, sure. But not illegal.
It would be a very different thing if they decided to shut down any type of adult content, because the guidelines, as we speak, never forbade it. That would be, a very harsh and unfair - yet very legal - decision from Patreon. Paypal did just that. But Paypal is a big player that can afford that sort of dirty trick. Patreon can't.
It was specifically Braintree (subsidiary of Paypal) that suspended payments to adult creators until Patreon managed to convince them that they do not carry the typical customer risk of chargebacks and claims of fraudulent use.
The real risk is that Patreon might have no say in this and taking them to court will accomplish nothing because no other party will be able to set up.
However, it's not exactly true.
There's nothing stopping somebody outside the US from setting up where these rules don't apply. The only tricky part is going to be connecting with payment processors, but there's a bunch in EU that will accept credit cards issued by US banks, and they would be ecstatic to do just that.