An Ontario court has ruled that companies can be held responsible for child pornography which appears on their servers in a landmark ruling, Toronto Star reports.
The case concerned a Toronto-based company called YesUp eCommerce Solutions Inc., which has been described as a "big box store" for child predators seeking access to child exploitation material.
It is the first case in Canadian history where a corporation has been convicted on charges related to child pornography.
YesUp has received over 200 warnings since 2012 that Lumfile.com, a Vietnam-based website hosted on their servers, contains and distributes child pornography. Despite consistent warnings and thousands of users accessing the site, YesUp never took it down.
According to police, nearly 12,000 people downloaded a total of 1.9 million files of child pornography from the website.
"They did not set out to make these horrific materials available to those seeking to collect them by those offering the materials for public consumption but, by their actions and, perhaps more relevant, by their inactions, they turned a blind eye or completely ignored the obvious red flags," wrote Justice A. Chamberlain, the judge overseeing the case. "Every moment that an image or video stays online provides an opportunity for individuals to victimize that child."
In fact, it appears that YesUp had a cl0se relationship with the Vietnam-based website. YesUp hosted 32 servers for Lumfile and at one point helped the owner of Lumfile with a server issue, despite screenshots of the issue clearly showing files related to child pornography.
Despite being found responsible for allowing the website to operate, some critics are concerned that the company only faced a fine of $10,000, especially since YesUp was profiting $80,000 per year from hosting the website on its servers.
"Where do you draw the line between the liability of the directors of the organization and the employees in the organization and liability with the company itself?" asked Toronto-based criminal defense lawyer Jordan Donich. He further described the fine as "not proportional."
Criminal charges were originally laid against five men associated with YesUp, but these charges were all downgraded to regulatory offenses for failure to report the child pornography material to police.
The ruling may also have implications for the Quebec-based company MindGeek, which owns PornHub. The company has seen controversy in recent weeks after an expose from The New York Times revealed that child pornography is commonly posted and easily accessible on the platform. The article also criticized the Canadian authorities for not doing more to regulate pornography websites.
Stephen Whitzman, the lawyer for YesUp, said "it would seem to me that, from a moral point of view... YesUp's involvement with the child porn is less direct than Pornhub's is." However, experts largely are suggesting that the impact this ruling could have on MindGeek is unclear.
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