Report: Pirated Porn Videos Taken Down From Discord Servers

LOS ANGELES—After an explosive report published Wednesday by the tech news site Motherboard, the gaming chat network Discord says it has banned multiple servers that were hosting pirated porn clips stolen from subscription-only platforms.  Especially since the coronavirus pandemic forced a halt to porn production, performers have increasingly relied on income generated from paid subscription sites where they can give solo, sometimes customized performances. But as interest in the paid subscription model has risen, so has digital piracy. In Wednesday’s report, Motherboard revealed that pirates have grabbed thousands of clips from OnlyFans and other performer-driven, paid sites, using simple software scripts that allow them to download the clips in huge quantities, quickly and efficiently. The process of gathering such data from websites is called “scraping.” Many of those clips have been posted for free, or in some cases sold — with no income going to the performers — on servers that are part of the Discord network, according to the Motherboard revelations. Discord is a chat app, similar to Skype or Slack, but designed specifically for gamers to communicate as they play. But according to the site Digital Trends, “users have also embraced Discord as a semipublic, forum-style community platform,” creating “servers” that allow large online congregations of users who share common interests.  "We've fully scraped accounts that have thousands of videos,” one pirate, whose name was not revealed, told Motherboard. “Literally everything gets scraped. Images, videos, audio and text.” The pirate described how the clips are resold via the Discord network. ”The data I scrape is resold to a few clients who either own adult websites that host pirated content or people who resell content on Discord,” the anonymous pirate said. “It really is just going down a rabbit hole. One person sells to another, and then that person sells to another, and so on." Motherboard followed up Thursday on its initial investigation, and was told by Discord that servers hosting the pirated content had been removed. "Discord prohibits the sale, dissemination, and promotion of cracked accounts," the company told Motherboard in a statement. "We ban users and shut down servers that are responsible for this behavior. In cases of copyrighted material, we respond promptly to DMCA takedown requests and take the appropriate action." In addition, according to the Motherboard report, Google has now banned an extension from its Chrome browser that allowed easy “scraping” of OnlyFans accounts. Often, pirates do mot even pay for subscriptions to scrape the content — instead waiting for promotional offers that allow free access to the paid sites, then jumping in and downloading thousands of clips for illegal distribution, Motherboard reported. Photo by CaptainBlackburn / Wikimedia Commons