This went too far. I know this site. They used to be a closed private place, but now it’s all open for any guest and even the search engines.
We understand that defending our copyright is our own problem mostly, but you, the patreon staff, should help us with that, at least somehow! Right now, this web site is basically making whole the patreon meaningless. I could just leave my paypal adress and ask my watchers - “hey if you want to donate me, just send whatever you like this way!”. Anyone can bookmark a page from this site and even subscribe to it and watch all your newest artwork appear there, they don’t even need to go to patreon or to your personal gallery anymore. Right now this website is using automated bots to crawl through creator accounts, because your system is like an open door for everyone to leech the bonus content. And even though I don’t think I suffer THAT much from the thieves, because I use early access model, it does feel like a huge slap in the face for me and my good patrons especially. And worst of all, it does leak all the replies too!
Please, patreon staff, you must do something about it, and do it quick. The time has run out for testing “pay upfront” feature, you need to release it.
I also have some ideas to fight bots and leaks, at least give them SOME trouble if they want to do it!!!
Allow us to approve any new pledge, so we can review the patron and ask him a question or two, that way we can see if it’s not a bot and the email is valid. And before the approvement has been done, he would have no access to the rewards.
Charge the new patron accounts some small fee, before they can start subscibing to creators, like $1, so you can validate their payment methods, with a refund after a first successful pledge payment
Make the bans site-wide. If some patron account has been blocked by 3 creators - ban it completely! That way the bots won’t be able to keep attacking more creators.
And of course the pay upfront feature, this would make botting impossible and would make a thief’s life whole lot more difficult.
All of these are very good points, and if number 1 was in effect I could stop most of the bots (like the one I had this morning) from gaining access to the content.
Almost all (or rather, probably 100% of them. I just can’t remember the first ones very well) of the bots/fake accounts I’ve had are based off of twitter accounts. They’d steal the name and profile image of a random twitter account to appear legit. The email would be [twitter username]@gmail.com. If You look up the twitter its likely someone that just wouldn’t pledge to your style of content, like an indian massage parlor or something. The final clue is that they just joined and are only pledging to you.
I block these accounts on sight.
While legally Patreon can’t do anything, I think the idea of payment verification, IP banning, and more access to pay up front might help. IP banning might not be effective though due to how many of these accounts are throwaway and they can just change their IP.
Truth be told the fee restructuring for the upcoming-but-now-uncertain anniversary model would have actually helped drastically with this, but there were too many other issues.
One other thing to note, I don’t know if this is still the case but if I remember correctly Ellie had mentioned this before:
If your items are set as “available to $X and up” ONLY patrons with a payment under their belt can see it. If you set this to the minimum pledge, new patrons will not see it.
If you set stuff to ‘Patron only’ new patrons can see it even if they haven’t had a pledge go through yet. One solution (for now) may be to set your stuff to your base tier, rather than leaving it at ‘Patron Only.’
(I don’t know if this is still the case or if I had it wrong.)
And again I want to stress that everyone should be viewing Patreon as a means to support you and interact with your community. You want people to pledge because they want you to create more art first and foremost. Using it like a storefront, where the major reason people pledge is just to get access to stuff, makes issues like this much more prevalent.
Piracy and leaks will forever be a problem for the digital artist, and they never intend to pay you from the get go whether or not they get your content. If you’re gonna use paywalls you’ve gotta keep this in mind in advance.
I’m afraid it does show everything to any new patron right away when they make a pledge regardles of reward tier chosen. That’s how this botting system works. I do agree that patreon isn’t essentially a shop (but for some creators it is), that’s why I only offer early access to my patrons. I also accept the inevitable evil of leaks and theft, what I DO NOT accept is a situation where an automated public mirror of your paid content exists, refreshing instantly. This is a flaw in patreon system that needs to be fixed ASAP. At least give us an option to review and activate new patrons, this will make automatic botting impossible. For now i’m going to try to bait bots by posting a preview, blocking the bot which will come a couple minutes later and then change the post to actually offer the artwork to my real patrons and will also send them a copy via mail.
Surely that site is violating the Patreon terms of service, and Patreon could block them and/or take legal action against them. It’s hard to believe that Patreon is just blessing them ripping off all the content and telling individual creators to handle it.
There’s a big handful of reasons why that’s not how things work. Many have already been addressed in this thread, but to summarize:
You cannot block a user from accessing your site. Unless you have whitelisted IPs, which would mean virtually no one can access your site, they can just get access via any random user, a changed IP, etc. The most that can be done is the ability to IP ban specific users who pay into this site but that is NOT going to stop them outright.
Patreon legally cannot do anything against them as Patreon does not legally own the work posted. This in addition to preventing Patreon from being 100% responsible for what users posts, also means that we maintain ownership of our work which is stupidly important. However, it also means that the burden of dealing with content theft falls upon us. This is NOT unique to Patreon at all–virtually every website has this same relationship. This is creatorship 101. (And I’m not going to give up the rights of my work to Patreon just so they could deal with this. I wouldn’t do so for Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, etc. either.)
Users aren’t beholden to Patreon’s terms of service if they do not use Patreon. The ToS only applies to how you’re able to use the platform in question. It has literally zero effect in this case. ToS are not really binding legally anyway.
Being unable to do anything directly about a website is quite a huge difference from granting them their blessing. Patreon has been dealing with this website for months but their hands have always been pretty much tied. It’s a headache for them as much as it is for creators. This is not the first iteration of this website–they originally were shut down. A new one came up quickly under a new webhost. You cannot stop piracy and sites like this from existing without some very extreme measures (e.g. DRM).
A company is only able to control what is posted on their own website, and manage their own copyrights. They legally cannot take action upon another website unless their own copyright has been violated. The most that can be done is, as they said, is users who have had their content leaked filing a DMCA, not to the website but to the webhost, as the webhost would be able to respond accordingly. A site in specific does not need to respond to a DMCA (which does open them up to a legal response but no one has the moxie or money to go through with that) which is why they can get away with doxxing artists who file DMCAs. A webhost that is actually trying to conduct legitimate business however will be more likely to respond. (But this also means that you literally cannot do anything if it’s 100% self-hosted. However based on the information Carla provided, it is not.)
OK, I was wrong about the terms of service thing. But I’m suggesting that Patreon pursue the site not with a DMCA argument, but with an unauthorized-use or unauthorized-access type argument. Check out this case, which seems incredibly similar (if I’m reading it right, Facebook wins against a 3rd party that users could use to scrape profile information):
Finally, if you ask me, Patreon doing nothing except telling creators to file DMCA requests IS GIVING THEIR BLESSING. Seriously. They could pursue this via either legal or technical methods. They just got a truckload of cash. Surely they can afford either a lawyer or a developer.
All that said, it doesn’t affect me due to the way I issue rewards. I just can’t believe their response is “if it bothers you then do something yourself.”
I suppose if you REALLY wanted to figure out which patron was leaking the stuff you could set it up so you have the reward on your site. Then send a link to each of your patrons and when they go to the link have the reward (assuming it’s art or something) auto generate a small watermark that wouldn’t be noticed with the users unique link. That way you can see who is doing it and block them or just stop rewarding them.
It’d actually be very easy to do, thinking about it.
Just upload all the patrons into an sql table, send a link to all of them saying, "Hey for your reward this month go to and input your email address."
Then when they input their email, set it up so imagmagick puts a 99% opacity white text somewhere on the image with their email address. Boom. Found your leaker.
There’s tools being developed that put a sort of ‘digital fingerprint’ based on who downloads an image, inserting it into the metadata. (Dunno if it’s already in place, but I believe it may be for some users.)
This can be used to determine who is the one leaking, and if it is already implemented it is something on Patreon’s level. (I believe Sakimichan uses it? Tbh it’s all just been rumor/hearsay for me however.) The claims that Patreon isn’t doing anything about this are completely bogus and unfounded though.
What’s the point of finding the leaker, though? Maybe you’d block them on Patreon, but surely they’d have no problem setting up a new account to continue leaking?
I also personally think watermarking is a rather nasty thing to do, and would not support a creator who does that. It’s a problem of privacy when some file can be traced back to me by someone else.
A watermark or digital fingerprint in the metadata (which is a way better option than directly editing the image) is meant to determine if you have someone whose sole existence on your page is to leak your stuff.
If your account isn’t pay up front, then they can circumvent this with a bit of work, but if it is, then they’d have to pay you an additional amount to re-join IF you’re not able to ban them on sign-up / IP ban them or something like that.
It becomes much harder for them to work around being kicked or banned when their money is now at stake. As is they’re able to get away with a lot on non-up-front pages because the charges don’t come til after the start of the next month.
Because of pay up front my page only has the free posts leaked (until like August when I had an influx of temporary pledges for a short I made). Money becomes an effective barrier for leakers.
Yeah, but what is the benefit in finding the leaking account? It sounds to me like pay up front would be the solution, regardless of watermarks. It doesn’t cost more to re-join than it does to keep supporting you in the first place.
While the IP could be banned, it wouldn’t stop the user from accessing the site through any other IP address. For myself, that would be as easy as resetting my router, or using a VPN.
I want to continue to thank you for all the advocacy here. This is a statement we’re sharing with press. I also have added all the names of people above who had issues and we are conducting additional research to determine the full scope of impact.
Late last month, we learned that Yiff.party launched a new tool to enable a small number of bad-acting patrons to download patron-only content from some creators on Patreon and make it publicly available. We think this is awful, and our operations, product, and engineering teams are heads down taking both legal and technical action to block this theft. We’re also in touch with the handful of affected creators. We won’t accept this kind of behavior from the bad actors of the internet, and will vigorously fight on behalf of our creators to protect their art.
Sharing with press? What we’ve said? Our names? A little clarity on what is meant by this would be greatly appreciated as i’m sure some of us are wary about this.
Thank you so much for being proactive about this issue!
Oh! Not anyone’s names. We wouldn’t do that to anyone without their permission.
Just the statement that was below will be shared with press. I just wanted to let folks here know that I’ve added your names to our internal tracking so we can track the full scope of creators who have been targeted.
Late last month, we learned that Yiff.party launched a new tool to enable a small number of bad-acting patrons to download patron-only content from some creators on Patreon and make it publicly available. We think this is awful, and our operations, product, and engineering teams are heads down taking both legal and technical action to block this theft. We’re also in touch with the handful of affected creators. We won’t accept this kind of behavior from the bad actors of the internet, and will vigorously fight on behalf of our creators to protect their art.
Oooooh. Well that’s a relief! Got a little panicky there for a sec haha.
Yeah, pretty much all of my posted content from both my projects (one no longer in use) is all up there for everyone to see. (I DM finished content that isn’t public or going to be public, to my patrons directly via DM but still.)
Thank you for the update, and thanks to the teams who are working on this! I’ll continue to keep an eye out for further news. If there’s any other info or help you need from us creators, please let us know.