Sun August 16th
Aylo, the parent company behind Phub and several other adult platforms, agreed to pay $120 million to end two federal class actions. The settlement also commits the company to requiring government ID verification for every person who appears in uploaded content.
The two cases were filed in California and Alabama. Both accused the company of profiting from content showing people who were under 18 when it was recorded. The settlement class covers anyone who was a minor at the time they appeared in content on the company's sites. The motion was filed Friday in the US District Court for the Central District of California, as reported by Bloomberg Law.
For adult creators, if you shoot collaborative content, make sure every person in the frame submits government ID to the platform, not just the account holder. Expect re-verification requests on older library content too.
That also means more of your personal data and your collaborators' personal data sitting in a platform database. Worth remembering that this same company settled with the FTC last September over storing model data unencrypted, including Social Security numbers and home addresses, and retaining it indefinitely.
Two things to do this week. Get your 2257 paperwork current if it is not already. And ask every platform you upload to how long they keep ID scans and who inside the company can access them.
Source: Bloomberg Law
Sat August 15th
One woman's monthly referral check went from more than $3,000 to 44 cents. That number is at the center of a new lawsuit against the company that owns OnlyFans.
Alison Hardesty and Erika Heidewald filed a proposed class action on August 12 in federal court in California. Between them they recruited about 6,700 creators to the platform in 2019 and 2020. They say they did it because the company advertised a 5 percent referral commission that would last, in its own capital letters, for LIFETIME.
On May 1, 2020, the company emailed users and changed the terms. Commissions were cut to the first 12 months of a referred creator's earnings. A cap of $1,000,000 in referred earnings was added. The 12-month rule was applied backward to referrals made before the announcement, with a hard cutoff of May 1, 2021.
Hardesty earned nearly $47,000 in referral commissions through April 2021. In June 2021 she received $76. Heidewald earned more than $28,000 over the same stretch. Her June 2021 payment was 44 cents.
The complaint names Fenix International Limited and Fenix Internet LLC and claims breach of contract, promissory estoppel and conversion. The company has not responded in court and none of the allegations have been tested.
I remember when this happened. But I feel like this case is about something bigger than referral money. For me it's about whether anything a platform tells us in writing actually holds. We build these companies. We bring the traffic, the creators and the culture, and then the terms change on a Friday afternoon and everyone is expected to absorb it quietly. I believe published terms should mean something after you have already done the work.
I want to hear your version of this. Has a platform ever changed a payout structure, a revenue share or a promo deal on you after you had already put the work in? Tell me which platform and what happened.
Source: ClassAction.org
University of Michigan researchers uploaded 50 AI generated images to X. They reported half of them as non consensual and half as copyright violations. The copyright reports got everything taken down inside 25 hours. The consent reports got nothing taken down in over three weeks.
That study is the backdrop for the first high profile test of the Take It Down Act, the federal law that entered civil enforcement on May 19, 2026.
Jaden Newman, a 22 year old guard for Cal State LA, said on a Twitch stream in early August that she was hacked after private videos of her began spreading on X, through WhatsApp groups and across dozens of third party sites. Her situation landed in front of a national audience about 80 days into enforcement.
What the law gives you. If your intimate content is posted without consent on a covered platform, you can file a removal request with your signature, enough detail to locate the content, a good faith statement that it is non consensual and your contact information. The platform then has 48 hours to remove it and to make reasonable efforts to find identical copies. The FTC can fine a non compliant platform up to $53,088 per violation. There is a complaint portal at TakeItDown.ftc.gov for when a platform ignores you.
Where it stops. A covered platform means a service that primarily hosts user uploaded content. Dedicated leak aggregator sites often fall outside that definition or operate in countries the FTC cannot reach. Encrypted group chats sit outside it too. A re-encoded file at a different resolution with a few seconds trimmed off the front does not register as a known identical copy, so automated matching walks right past it.
For adult creators that is the whole shape of the problem. The removal right is real and worth using hard on Instagram, X, TikTok and Reddit, where a valid request now carries legal weight it did not carry two years ago. The sites that keep your content up for years are the ones the law was not built to reach. Save your evidence and file on the mainstream platforms fast. The aggregator layer still needs a fix nobody in Congress has written yet.
Source: Tech Times