Mediaboss Marketing

PayPal has found itself at the center of a heated debate over online censorship after demanding that e-book publishers remove from their marketplaces titles with objectionable themes of rape, bestiality, incest and underage sexual activity.

PayPal, the primary payment services provider for independent online publishers such as Smashwords, has attempted to clarify its position, explaining that the decision to lean on e-book merchants is consistent with a longstanding usage policy and was motivated by the risks associated with trafficking in erotica that runs afoul of the terms of service of its financial services partners, seeking to tamp down allegations of censorship.

"PayPal is a payments company. The right to use PayPal's service is not the same as the right to speak," Anuj Nayar, PayPal's director of communications, wrote in a post on PayPal's corporate blog.

"Unlike many other online payment providers, PayPal does allow its service to be used for the sale of erotic books," Nayar said. "We believe that the Internet empowers authors in a way that is positive and points to an even brighter future for writers, artists and creators the world over, but we draw the line at certain adult content that is extreme or potentially illegal."

PayPal began approaching e-book publishers in February with what Smashwords has described as an ultimatum, insisting that the companies remove erotica titles containing objectionable content or see their accounts deactivated. Other affected companies include BookStrand.com, All Romance eBooks and eXcessica.

In the time since, PayPal has been in talks with the e-book publishers, and Nayar noted that the company has not severed its ties with any of them as it attempts to reach a solution. Smashwords, which has been among the most vocal about the imbroglio, has said that PayPal's enforcement team has been helpful and that talks have been productive, though it acknowledges that there is no clear and simple path forward.

Smashwords founder Mark Coker has also pointed out that PayPal is within its legal rights to bar payment services to marketplaces trading in content that violates its policies, and that, moreover, the crackdown on objectionable erotica comes at the behest of credit card companies, credit unions and other financial partners. Nevertheless, he is urging PayPal to relax its position, arguing that the company is unfairly targeting writers of erotica while the policy, carried to its logical extent, would also ban the sale of controversial mainstream literature such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

"There's no easy solution. Legally, PayPal and the credit card companies probably have the right to decide how their services are used. Unfortunately, since they're the moneyrunners, they control the oxygen that feeds digital commerce," Coker wrote in an email to Smashwords authors and publishers.

"Regardless (of) one's opinions about these objectionable topics, we view this attempted censorship as a bad precedent. Fiction is fantasy. It's not real," he said.

But PayPal disputes that point. Not only do e-books about subjects like rape and bestiality often contain objectionable images, they can fall into a dubious genre that is not entirely fictive, according to Nayar.

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PayPal Erotica Ban Touches Off Internet Censorship Debate