Pirates are undermining Patreon’s financial structure, reposting paywalled images on an illicit website for free! The makers of these images are furious that people would opt to put their livelihoods in jeopardy to score free porn!

Ummm… Welcome to 2012?

Recently, a presumably well-meaning writer at Kokatu, Cecilia D’Anastasio, reported on Yiff.Party. The site has been around since 2015 but, according to D’Anastasio, has picked up speed exponentially in recent weeks.

Here’s how Yiff.Party works: Users or bots subscribe to Patreon creators’ accounts, allowing them access to content that’s restricted to patrons who pay. After scraping the paid content, the users or bots upload it onto Yiff.Party’s feed, where it’s accessible for free.

Yiff.Party’s admin told D’Anastasio that users uploaded over 3,000 posts in 24 hours last week. Those posts mostly contain porn, both live-action and yiff (a referent to furry sex), but other artists have also been impacted.

Affected Patreon creators interviewed by D’Anastasio are understandably upset. For instance, an artist called Alice who makes $230 a month and estimates she relies on Patreon for a quarter of her income, reported feeling “absolutely shattered” after seeing her content on Yiff.Party. Another creator reported feeling “hurt” that consumers would rather steal art than support it with a small donation.

For its part, Patreon has reportedly told creators to file DMCA takedown requests, which Yiff.Party allegedly ignored.

A Patreon spokesperson wrote in an email to D’Anastasio, “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.” The spokesperson added, “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.”

D’Anastasio also corresponded with Yiff.Party’s unnamed admin, who wrote via email: “The site’s mission is simply to make paid Patreon content available for free… We’re not out to get creators or make them lose income,” which makes little sense. The admin added that Yiff.Party is accepting donations because he himself has a full-time job and works on the site in his spare time.

Here’s the thing. None of what D’Anastasio has discovered here is new or newsworthy. The fact that piracy is happening via Patreon (versus behind the paywall of an adult site) to content that people may consider more conventionally artistic only makes it more recognizable as dastardly to mainstream sites and writers.

According to Takedown Piracy’s Nate Glass, sites like Yiff.Party shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

“Pirates do not care whose content they steal as long as they get free stuff… and there will always be someone who is happy to profit from this theft by offering a platform for pirates,” Glass said. “And then you also have groups like the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), who will always advocate for pirates and thieves as long as it benefits their tech financiers.”

“The EFFs and Techdirts of the world will defend these pirates with every ounce of energy they have because it’s easier to pander to freeloaders than it is to take an ethical stance in support of content creators,” Glass continued.

Glass speculated that no new laws will be enacted to prevent piracy in this manner because Google will not allow that to happen. Glass speculated that Google is more likely to throw more money at the EFF to come up with another scare tactic campaign. “If they shut down Patreon pirates, the next thing they’ll do is shut down the entire internet for everyone and make kicking puppies mandatory!” Glass hypothesized sarcastically, regarding EFF’s next campaign.

In the end, it will be business as usual, even for this type of “art piracy.” Glass explained that Yiff.Party “will continue to hide behind anonymous registration services making it difficult to ascertain the owner. They’ll use overseas webhosts that are havens for criminal activity. They’ll use ad networks like Exoclick that turn a blind eye and continue to finance criminal behavior — and the lemmings on the internet will believe it.”

“The Patreon creators will stop creating, but at least some pirate in Russia made some bitcoin so it was all worth it.”

Image via Ryan Glanzer.