Copyright Law

Pirate Bay Launches ?Video Bay? Video Streaming Site

By soulxtc

Takes on YouTube by certainly offering copyrighted material as it does with its BitTorrent tracker site.

After a two-year stint in Beta the guys behind Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay have launched the Video Bay “Beta extreme,” a You Tube-style video streaming site that will perhaps eventually offer copyrighted content in the same manner as does the Pirate Bay.

The Video Bay a Flash-based video site where users can upload and watch files to their heart’s content ostensibly without concern for pesky copyright laws.

“To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technology?, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specifically the <video> and <audio> tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats,” reads a message on the site. “This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly.”

It’s currently a little low on content, sporting some music videos and TV shows mainly, but that’s sure to change as time goes on.

There’s also no mention of what took them so long to get the site up and running these last 2 years. Perhaps it was because they had their hands full with the whole entertainment industry lawsuit thing.

At the time of the initial Beta launch back in 2007 Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep said the site will be modeled after YouTube in that content will be user generated. What will set it apart however, is that there will be ?no censorship,? that The Pirate Bay ?will not be the moral police? and determine what content stays or goes as is oftentimes the case with YouTube. He then hinted that that the community will instead be the censors, that ?the community will have to do that.?

He also said that it’ll be a ?different game than torrents since we will host the content,? meaning that they will have to deal with copyright issues. But, as is usually the case with The Pirate Bay they ?have some aces up (their) sleeves on how to solve it.?

?We?re going for a free system, with a solution to not care so much about copyright but still not breaking laws,? he said. ?We?re not revolutionizing the world, we?re taking it just a small step further.?

I don’t think the Video Bay will help them with their legal woes after already having been convicted for the facilitation of copyright infringement, so I’d sure love to see them “aces” Brokep’s speaking of.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on June 30, 2009 (boomark / email).