This article needs to be updated.(December 2022) |
Type of site | Pornographic video sharing |
---|---|
Available in | English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Polish and Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Romanian |
Founded | August 2006 |
Headquarters | , Cyprus |
Country of origin | United States |
Owner | Aylo [1] |
URL | www.youporn.com |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | August 26, 2006 |
Current status | Active |
Content license | Gratis; youporninhd.com is proprietary |
YouPorn is a free pornographic video-sharing website owned by Aylo that launched in August 2006.
YouPorn's own site reports that its owner is Midstream Media International N.V., seated in Willemstad, the capital city of Curaçao, an island in the southern Caribbean Sea that forms a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. [2] The site is run from a hosting service in Texas, although one reporter described the site as "German-based". [3]
In 2011, YouPorn was purchased by the adult entertainment and IT company Manwin, owners of other popular pornographic websites such as Pornhub [1] and SpankWire based in Luxembourg. [4]
As of 2012, [update] ExtremeTech reported YouPorn transferred an average of 950 TB per day, [5] up from a reported figure of 3 TB per day in 2006. [6]
Concerns have surfaced over the inability to verify the age of the persons depicted in the videos, the possibility of copyrighted videos being uploaded to the site, and the possibility of privacy violations when private sex tapes are uploaded without the consent of all involved parties. [3] In 2007 Vivid Entertainment took legal action against YouPorn, claiming that the streaming of copyrighted material was depriving it of revenue. [7]
YouPorn has been called "a good role model for the sexually naive", as many of its homemade videos depict amateur couples having ordinary sex (known as "Amateur"), as opposed to the often unreal scenarios of commercial porn. [8]
In February 2012, the site was hacked, with the details of over 1 million users leaked onto the Internet. MindGeek blamed this on the failings of a third-party chat service. [9]
German law does not allow hardcore pornography without an effective age verification system, and the German Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons placed YouPorn on its index. As a result, since April 2007, the German site of the Google search engine classified YouPorn as a hardcore pornography website [10] and replaced it with a link to Chilling Effects, claiming that a "German regulatory body reported illegal material". [11]
Following a request by Kirchberg, the owner of a competing pornography service (now defunct), [12] German provider Arcor categorized YouPorn and a few other porn sites as hardcore pornographic and also blocked access to the website at the routing level in September 2007, [13] affecting over 2 million users. The German Pirate Party promptly opened a proxy server so that Arcor customers could continue to easily access YouPorn.
Arcor lifted the block on September 17 because the IP address-based filter which had been set up for YouPorn adversely affected other sites. [14] Kirchberg then sued, alleging that Arcor aided unfair competition by YouPorn, and on October 19, 2007, obtained a temporary injunction ordering Arcor to resume limiting the accessibility to YouPorn.com. [15] [16] On October 23, 2007, Arcor started to control access to YouPorn again, this time with a DNS-based approach that is easily circumvented, [17] and successfully filed an appeal against the injunction. [18]
Kirchberg has sent notices to 19 German ISPs demanding that YouPorn be granted access limitations, but none have complied. [19] Efforts by Kirchberg to obtain injunctions regarding YouPorn from internet providers in Kiel and Düsseldorf were unsuccessful. [20] [21]
In May 2008 it was reported that Singapore had blocked access to YouPorn and RedTube, in what a government officials described as "a symbolic statement". [22]
In July 2009 Sri Lanka blocked access to 12 porn web sites including YouPorn, RedTube, XVideos and xHamster. On July 25, 2009, Sri Lanka Chief Magistrate Nishantha Hapuarachchi ordered the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission to block those 12 websites from all local Internet Service Providers. [23] [24]
The Government of India banned YouPorn in 2018, among other porn websites, after a Uttarakhand High Court court order demanding the same in a rape case where the perpetrators stated they were motivated to do so after watching online pornography. [25]
YouPorn sponsors an esports team known as Team YP. [26] [27] [28] In July 2014, YouPorn stated their intentions to enter the professional esports scene by sponsoring either a Dota 2 or League of Legends team. [29] On December 3, 2014, YouPorn announced their official entry into the Dota 2 scene with the acquisition of a Spanish team previously known as Play2Win. On June 9, 2015, Team YP announced that they had signed Super Smash Bros. player Jason "Bizzarro Flame" Yoon. [30] Team YP's Street Fighter division consists of Valentin "Valmaster" Petit and Anton "Filipin0man" Herrera with the former being signed on September 23 and the latter being signed on October 8. [31] [32] In October 2015, Team YP announced they were searching for a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team. [33] They stated they wanted one all-male and one all-female team. [34] [35]
Definitions and restrictions on pornography vary across jurisdictions. The production, distribution, and possession of pornographic films, photographs, and similar material are activities that are legal in many but not all countries, providing that any specific people featured in the material have consented to being included and are above a certain age. Various other restrictions often apply as well. The minimum age requirement for performers is most typically 18 years.
Rape pornography is a subgenre of pornography involving the description or depiction of rape. Such pornography either involves simulated rape, wherein sexually consenting adults feign rape, or it involves actual rape. Victims of actual rape may be coerced to feign consent such that the pornography produced deceptively appears as simulated rape or non-rape pornography. The depiction of rape in non-pornographic media is not considered rape pornography. Simulated scenes of rape and other forms of sexual violence have appeared in mainstream cinema, including rape and revenge films, almost since its advent.
Arcor is the former name of the fixed phone line and Internet business of Vodafone D2 GmbH, a German subsidiary of telecommunications company Vodafone. It is the second-largest provider of fixed phone lines in Germany after Deutsche Telekom. Its name changed on 1 August 2009 after Vodafone completed acquisition of the company. Its headquarters were in Eschborn near Frankfurt. It is one of the few telecommunications companies in Germany to operate an ISDN network that is independent of the incumbent provider Deutsche Telekom.
The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC), headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, USA, with a regional presence in the United Kingdom, Europe, Turkey, Africa, Canada, Latin America, Caribbean, Southeast Asia, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australasia, is a private 501(c)(3) non-governmental, nonprofit global organization. It combats child sexual exploitation, child pornography, child trafficking and child abduction.
Internet censorship in the United Kingdom is conducted under a variety of laws, judicial processes, administrative regulations and voluntary arrangements. It is achieved by blocking access to sites as well as the use of laws that criminalise publication or possession of certain types of material. These include English defamation law, the Copyright law of the United Kingdom, regulations against incitement to terrorism and child pornography.
Censorship of video-sharing platform YouTube occurs to varying degrees in many countries.
The Barcelona International Erotic Film Festival or FICEB is an annual Spanish pornographic film festival and awards ceremony. It is the oldest adult film festival in Europe.
RedTube is a pornographic video-sharing site, which in September 2009 held an Alexa ranking within the world's top 100 sites. It is one of several pornographic websites owned by Aylo. In June 2010 it had fallen out of the top 100, but it made a return in mid-2012. As of mid September 2020 its Alexa ranking was 520. Its popularity has been ascribed to its non-sexual name, which is a reference to the non-pornographic video sharing website YouTube. The website is based in Houston, Texas, and has servers in San Francisco, New Orleans and Montreal.
Lutz Heilmann is a German politician of the left-wing party Die Linke. He was elected to the Bundestag in the 2005 federal election as a member of the party list in Schleswig-Holstein. Shortly thereafter it was revealed that he had worked for the Stasi from 1985 to 1990. Heilmann drew national and international media attention when he caused the website www.wikipedia.de
to be blocked by a preliminary injunction on 13 November 2008. His Bundestag term ended in 2009, and he failed to be nominated for a second term.
Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 is a law in the United Kingdom criminalising possession of what it refers to as "extreme pornographic images". The law came into force on 26 January 2009. The legislation was brought in following the murder of Jane Longhurst by a man who was said at the time of his trial to have had "extreme pornography" in his possession at the time of the death. The law has been more widely used than originally predicted, raising concerns as to whether the legislation is being used for prosecutions beyond the scope originally envisaged by parliament.
Bryan Matthew Sevilla, known professionally by the stage name James Deen, is an American pornographic actor and director.
Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet; primarily via websites, FTP connections, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular.
Bomis, Inc. was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Brazzers is a Canadian pornographic video production and distributing company headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, and legal domicile in Nicosia, Cyprus. With an online network consisting of thirty-one hardcore pornography websites, the company's slogan is "World's Best HD Porn Site!" and features paid subscription-based content.
The Zugangserschwerungsgesetz was a German law that aimed to make it difficult to access sites on the World Wide Web with depictions of sexual activity by and against children. The Federal Criminal Police Office would maintain a list of sites found to contain child pornography as defined by German criminal law. A two-fold strategy was intended: if it proved impossible to have offending sites taken down in appropriate time, German Internet service providers would be required to block access to the sites through methods such as DNS poisoning. Surfers would be redirected to a page showing a “stop” sign. Prosecution solely because of an attempt to access blocked site or domain was not planned.
Aylo is a Canadian multinational pornographic conglomerate owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. It is primarily involved in internet pornography, operating a number of video sharing websites, and pornographic film studios such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, Reality Kings, Sean Cody, and WhyNotBi.com, among others. Aylo's headquarters are located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but the company's corporate structure is divided among entities domiciled in a number of other countries.
xHamster is a pornographic media and social networking site headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus. xHamster serves user-submitted pornographic videos, webcam models, pornographic photographs, and erotic literature and incorporates social networking features. xHamster was founded in 2007. As of August 2024, it is the 33rd-most-visited website in the world and the third-most-visited adult website after Pornhub and XVideos.
Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, one of several owned by adult entertainment conglomerate Aylo. As of August 2024, Pornhub is the 16th-most-visited website in the world and the most-visited adult website.