Well. PayPal's being awfully cooperative.

[azurelunatic]

I wonder if PayPal intends to revise their policies for other businesses that they've come down upon in the past, or whether they're only extending this much-needed change to Smashwords.

http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/03/paypal-revises-policies-to-allow-legal.html

Comments

[xenacryst]

*holds breath*

*waits*

*turns blue*

Yeah, I didn't think so, either.

[azurelunatic]

I wonder what would happen if, like, Mark dropped by in person for a chat.

[cleverthylacine]

I've been a member since 2001/2 and an Advantage member for 4 years or more. He could drag me along. They like me.

[silveradept]

Well, that's a good start. Hopefully the revisions here will allow for places like DW to be able to use Paypal without demands that they be censored.

[azurelunatic]

I can hope. (Or not, because I'm a cynical bastard.)

[vass]

The way this is being spun confuses me a lot, since I thought their previous objection to adult material was not that it's illegal, but that it's a financial risk re chargebacks.

[azurelunatic]

It all smacks of weaseling.

[cleverthylacine]

No, that's never been their objection. They've been refusing to allow transactions involving adult material since 2001-2002; people have lost accounts for having Paypal buttons on sites that just linked to porn.

(Sorry, I've been an eBay seller since 1997 and I sell a lot of Japanese stuff, and am so familiar with stories of people who lost their accounts for selling doujinshi.)

Paypal only started allowing their service to be used for legal adult materials sold to verified adults only when they signed the deal to be eBay's main payment service and eBay disallowed the use of cheques and money orders; it used to be that if you sold doujinshi on eBay, you had to take cheques or money orders or have a credit card processor. Even people who sold perfectly gen doujinshi once lost accounts because Paypal thought all doujinshi were hentai or yaoi for a really, really long time.

This chargeback stuff is pure bullshit. I was pleased that Visa denied it.

I use Paypal because I'm on eBay and because being a Paypal advantage user nets me $10-15 a month cash back on purchases run on their card, and their fraud staff enabled me to be one of the only people ever to get a refund from Clipper, so I'm not getting up in a fight with them because my bank account is so inextricably linked with them that it could impact my ability to write a rent cheque if they got sufficiently pissed. (This is also why I haven't moved my money out of Bank of America; it's going to involve a lot of paperwork and I'm not even sure if Paypal does credit unions the same way.)

But I am also pretty surprised that anyone thinks this is a NEW thing. They used to be so much worse. In fact one of the worst things you can do to a Paypal business user who has their bank accounts linked is report them for using Paypal for porn; one of the reasons I'm super careful to keep them 100% separated is that if you have trolls or vindictive ex-friends, they will often attempt to report you for something like that to fuck up your life.