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Paypal: Censors in the name of Profit

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40hz:
Hmmm... Icky issue...

Still, I find censorship at the payment level completely distasteful. These kinds of things should be at the edge, i.e. at the publisher level.


-Renegade (February 29, 2012, 11:26 PM)
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There's an argument that what isn't legal or acceptable in the physical world doesn't magically become legal and acceptable when it's put up on the web. Political and thought-crime aside, I find I largely agree with that argument.

I try to use a real-world transform to see if what is happening on the web represents a change, or is just a legitimate and rational extension of an existing meme.

In this specific case, I think there's enough legal precedence and public understanding to not get overly concerned.

Let's go real-world for a minute. Somebody like MasterCard or Amex wouldn't be considered an accessory to an illegal act just because somebody used one of their cards to purchase the means necessary to commit a crime. Or to receive payment for it.

But Mastercard would be considered an accessory if they deliberately courted such businesses (Open a MasterCrackDealer account today!) - or showed a pattern of knowingly and deliberately processing payments for something they had reason to believe was illegal.

So in PayPal's case, yeah...they do have something to be concerned about here.

But it would have been better if they just put their cards on the table and simply said: Look people, there's some stuff going on that we don't want to be involved with. So if you're into that sort of thing you're going to have to get somebody other than us to process transactions for it.

PayPal is a private business. They're not a government agency. They have the right to decide what business they will carry. I don't have a problem with that.

What I do worry about is how pressuring PayPal might open the doors for a convenient way for governments and interest groups to effectively censor materials not quite so broadly offensive as what PayPal is now refusing to handle. Especially when you consider how almost anything you can think of (or do) is likely to be illegal in some part of this world.

Tough call this story. I agree with PayPal not wanting to handle this type of business. But I also fault them for not having the kahunas to originally say what the real reasons for that decision were.

At any rate, this is a potential bellwhether that bears watching because of the opportunity it provides for future legal abuses.
 
Onward!  :Thmbsup: 8)

wraith808:
Tough call this story. I agree with PayPal not wanting to handle this type of business. But I also fault them for not having the kahunas to originally say what the real reasons for that decision were.

At any rate, this is a potential bellwhether that bears watching because of the opportunity it provides for future legal abuses.
-40hz (March 01, 2012, 06:35 AM)
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I think this sums it up.  Their original letter that spoke to all erotic content was a heavy handed approach.  If they were targeting things of a specific legality, they should have said it up front.  And then they should apply it across the board, not just to small publishers like SmashWords.  The second thing I have a problem with is the monopoly in the online payment space.  They have actively cultivated said monopoly and because of that, there are few alternatives if you deal in things outside of the realm of their space.

And I can say for sure that this is not just in the space of questionable areas of content, but any areas of erotic content.  This case might have been able to be reduced to such- but their TOS censors a lot more than this, and I've always thought this a bit squirrely for a payment processor.

TaoPhoenix:
^ Exactly.  Especially in the case of these distributors for a lot of indie authors- all are affected because of any blip, so the distributor is going to err on the side of the *MONEY*, instead of the few, no matter how they feel about it.

They say the reason is the same as the reason they won't let you use paypal for anything close to porn, including erotic nudity, etc.: because the number of chargebacks is increased on such business.  In reality, especially because of the haphazard enforcement, it appears to be censorship masked by fiduciary responsibility.
-wraith808 (February 28, 2012, 01:59 PM)
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Unfortunately this rendering is also true. : (

mouser:
My instinct tells me that this is NOT at all about about paypal trying to impose their morals and not wanting to traffic in porn or sexual stuff.  I suspect this is at heart a business decision.

Now whether it's a business decision based on high numbers of callbacks, or pressure from government, or pressure from community groups, or fears of being sued for or charged with aiding and abetting the sale of illegal content (that would be my guess), I can't say.  But these kinds of companies don't have morals in the way that a person does -- it is about the money.

daddydave:
I think the bottom line is Paypal does not want to be a generic money transfer service like Visa or Western Union. For example, from stories I have heard, if you try to send money "just because" or for charity, and they get wind of it, they will reverse the transaction. They started off as just an easy way to buy stuff on ebay, perhaps that explains things somewhat.

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