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Notes -
My sense from reading court documents (some interesting 4A law) is that just getting access to some CP is not all that hard. What is prized/valued in those communities is new CP, which does inherently involve new victimization. Warrant applications will say that they found such-and-such a server, and it had some 'examples' accessible on the surface, but you were required to upload new material that wasn't in their database already in order to get an account to access the rest of what they had. Moreover, you had to keep uploading new material every so often to maintain your account.
It seems that having this be inherently valued has a two-fold purpose for that community. First, it creates a direct incentive for people to become producers. Second, it serves as a 'law-enforcement filter', adding an additional layer of difficulty for law-enforcement to gain deeper access to the site. The unfortunate side-effect is that I don't get the sense that people are making large quantities of currency money by producing CP; they're instead gaining status and access in their tiny little community.
One of the main questions is to what extent this community value is dependent on the current size of the pool. They seem to like "new" and have these reasons other than the actual pool size to value it. I've seen some pretty large numbers in court documents about how big some of their pools are. Perhaps some of those numbers are somehow fudged (like how they talk about 'street value' of drugs seized), but it doesn't seem like the currently large pools that these folks are able to manage getting access to has yet become a serious impediment to them continuing to promote a local cultural value of "new".
I don't know for sure the mechanics behind how they manage to verify "new", but just from background knowledge of tech, I sort of have to imagine that AI gen is a much more serious threat to this local cultural value than just plopping up a Megaupload.
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