Your IP Address Has Excellent Taste

Picture the scene: organic red wine, a decent sandwich, a tube site open in a tab. Seven guys on a teenager, skip the talking parts, blowjob, skip, penetration, skip, blowjob, done. Perfectly calibrated evening. Except now apparently a law firm can send you a cease-and-desist for that.

A German outfit called Urmann + Collegen made headlines by issuing legal warnings to people who had streamed a film called Amanda’s Secrets via RedTube. Not downloaded—streamed. Just watched it in a browser window and closed the tab, like a normal person. The firm represents a company called The Archive AG, and the letters included the viewer’s IP address and a user ID, which raised the obvious question of how exactly they obtained that data from a site hosted in the United States.

Nobody had a clean answer. Attorney Karsten Gulden, tracking the case, noted that the method of data collection wasn’t explained in the letters themselves. Which is either reassuring—maybe it won’t hold up in court—or deeply unsettling, depending on how paranoid you feel.

The practical implication is this: next time you find yourself at midnight, clicking through a tube site, curating your way toward increasingly specific territory—the small-statured twin scenario, the aluminum-foil-wrapped pensioner situation, whatever particular corner of the catalog is yours—one of those clicks might eventually arrive at your door as paperwork. At which point you will stand before a judge and itemize your preferences under oath.

Your imagination is free, has no IP address, and generates no metadata. Worth remembering.