Deaf Man Suing Pornhub Over Lack of Closed Captioning

A New York man bought a subscription to Pornhub Premium—the site’s subscription service that unlocks ad-free “premium” HD and VR content. Once subscribed at $9.99 per month, Yarooslav Suris attempted to watch such videos as “Hot Step Aunt Babysits Disobedient Nephew,” “Sexy Cop Gets Witness to Talk,” and “Daddy 4K — Allison comes to Talk About Money to Her Boys’ Naughty Father.”

But there was a big problem: Suris is deaf and the videos didn’t have closed captioning. “The premium subscription was then useless as a result,” reported Gizmodo’s Tom Pritchard. 

So, Suris is suing for Pornhub for damages, and to get them to add closed captioning. “Without closed captioning deaf and hard-of-hearing people cannot enjoy video content on the Defendants (sic) Websites while the general public can,” 8NewsNow said, quoting court documents.

Suris claims that the lack of closed captioning violates the rights of the deaf and hard of hearing under the Americans with Disabilities Act. “The ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in areas of ‘employment, transportation, public accommodations, communications and access to state and local government programs and services,’ according to the U.S. Department of Labor,” Fox News’s David Aaro writes. With “communications” included in the list, it appears that Suris may have some legal footing for his suit.

Pornhub’s VP, Corey Price, has responded, telling TMZ: “While we do not generally comment on active lawsuits, we’d like to take this opportunity to point out that we do have a closed captions category.”

And Price is correct. Gizmodo reports: “The [closed-caption] feature was launched in June of 2018, is visible in the categories list, and claims to have 1,246 videos.” That may seem like plenty of variety, from which Suris could get his kicks for quite some time. But, Gizmodo’s Pritchard goes on to note, “The CC category doesn’t have nearly as many videos as others. It’s sitting between Celebrity and College on the official list, both of which have 7,668 and 11,706 videos respectively.” Yowch.

If the suit goes well, it may bring up some interesting questions about just what Pornhub’s responsibilities are vis-a-vis making its millions of user-uploaded videos fully accessible to consumers. After all, Pornhub doesn’t create most of this content. Does that mean that it’s the company’s job to add closed captioning after every video is uploaded? If so, is that even possible? Or should the onus be put on the users who upload the content? None of the answers are currently clear, but perhaps this case will give us all some clarity.

Even if the case is settled out of court—as seems likely—it’s still pretty satisfying to watch Pornhub get taken to task for not taking full responsibility for the millions of videos uploaded to the site, many of which have likely been uploaded in blatant disregard for copyright laws. Let’s see what happens! We’ve got popcorn.