An Amsterdam court today ordered one of the largest adult entertainment websites, xHamster, to remove all amateur footage showing recognizable people in the Netherlands who did not consent to be featured on the site.
The ruling followed complaints raised by the Expertise Bureau for Online Child Abuse, known as EOKM, which identified 10 videos where xHamster could not verify it had secured permission from amateur performers to post. The court found that this violated European privacy laws and conflicted with a prior judgment from the Amsterdam court requiring porn sites to receive permission from all performers recognizably featured before posting amateur videos.
“It is a victory for the rights and privacy of victims whose nude images were published without demonstrable consent,” EOKM said in a press release provided to Ars.
Hammy Media, which operates xHamster, could not immediately be reached for comment.
According to EOKM director Arda Gerkens, this ruling will require xHamster to clean up its site and is part of EOKM’s larger plan to stop all porn sites from distributing amateur footage without consent. The Amsterdam court has given xHamster three weeks to comply with the order and remove all footage posted without consent, or face maximum fines per video up to $32,000 daily.
“I am pleased that the court has confirmed once again that this type of amateur footage cannot simply be placed online,” Gerkens said in the press release. “The distribution of nude images in this way must be stopped and all porn sites play a role in that.”
Lawyers assisting EOKM on the case said the verdict had “major consequences for the entire porn industry,” including bigger sites like Pornhub, which already was required to remove 10 million videos, as Vice reported in 2020. “Now it’s xHamster’s turn,” Otto Volgenant of Boekx Advocaten said in EOKM’s press release, noting that 30 million people visit xHamster daily.
On xHamster, only professional producers and verified members can upload content. The website requires everyone who creates an account to upload an ID and share a selfie to become verified. Before any verified member’s upload is made public, xHamster moderators—a team of 28 who use software approved by EOKM to identify illegal content—conduct a review to block any illegal content. The website’s terms of service require that each uploader provides a consent form from each person recognizably featured in all amateur content. Hammy Media told the court that it had already removed all violating content that EOKM had flagged in the case and provided assurances that moderators check to ensure the uploader is the same person as the performer.
However, in his order, judge RA Dudok van Heel wrote that “it is sufficiently plausible for the time being that a large amount of footage is being made public on xhamster.com, of which it cannot be demonstrated that permission has been obtained from the persons who appear recognizable in the picture.”
Out of 10 videos flagged by EOKM, Hammy Media only provided proof of consent from a verified member who uploaded one of the videos. The court didn’t find that limited amount of evidence persuasive, noting that the consent form did not necessarily indicate that the uploader was the same person featured in the video.
All of these videos were posted between 2017 and 2020, before the court's prior order requiring consent in 2021, Hammy Media pointed out. The judge said that xHamster was still required to get permission for all amateur content on its site, not just content posted after 2021, and EOKM suggested in its press release that there are millions of older videos that xHamster will need to remove over the next three weeks to comply with the court order. Offending content includes both footage of people living in the Netherlands, whose content must be restricted globally, and footage of people living outside the Netherlands, whose content must be restricted within the Netherlands.
Gerkens said that it is “very difficult” for victims to “get unlawful images offline,” including those victims who “often do not even know that they have been posted on the Internet.” EOKM expects the court order will make it “easier to have those images removed” and helps provide “more clarity about which websites still do not comply" with privacy laws.
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