The Pirate Bay To Create YouTube Competitor

Jared writes "The Pirate Bay has confirmed that is working on a streaming video site with user-generated content. A spokesman said the site will be modeled after YouTube but there will be 'no censorship': The Pirate Bay 'will not be the moral police' and determine what content stays or goes as is oftentimes the case with YouTube. He added that 'the community will have to do that.'" The site will be at thevideobay.org, but nothing is up there for the public yet.

Comments

Something tells me a war is comming

[Intrinsic]

It will be interesting to see what happens if the new pirate bay video site becomes as popular as youtube. As more sites pop up that dont have restrictions on hosted content, what is going to happen to the other content providers who are restricted to what content they can host?

Re:Something tells me a war is comming

[xmas2003]

YEP ... although my guess is that censorship at the country borders (as has been done to YouTube a couple of times) and/or blocking by large organization (US military is doing so now) might curtail this slightly if they get really, really popular.

But yea, the content providers who have to "operate by the rules" will be handicapped ... so perhaps I Too Welcome our new Video Site Overlords!

Is this legal?

[Poromenos1]

How is this legal? I can understand how a tracker is legal, since they aren't hosting the actual files on their own server, but unless they come up with a way to do p2p video streaming, I can't imagine how this will stay up very long.

Sneak preview

[glassesmonkey]

Thanks to the google.

(Though one of their test uploads looks to be NSFW) google cache of thevideobay.org/recent

Prior to shutting down all external links that were left live, they were using flvplayer.js with this header in the javascript.

/* Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v3.20 <http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/>
Copyright 2005, 2006 Bobby van der Sluis
This software is licensed under the CC-GNU LGPL <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/LGPL/2.1/>
*/

Misplaced morals

[mattpointblank]

"The Pirate Bay 'will not be the moral police'"

Moral? Er, doesn't it just mean, "the police"? Sharing copyrighted material is a legal matter, it's not like debating the ethics of euthanasia.

this is a non-event

[acidrain]

But yea, the content providers who have to "operate by the rules" will be handicapped

Or the main stream won't notice because censorship is a nerd issue. So for the last time, there are no girls surfing youtube that want to see you naked.

Also Sweden's laws allow hosting .torrents as they are not copyrighted, but tpb will have all the same headaches as anyone else if they start serving up tv rips off their servers.

Clever, Pirate Bay, very clever indeed.

[Jugalator]

Did you people know that it's 100% legal for Swedes to watch copyrighted streaming video? (without holder's permission)
I'm not sure about the USA, but over here, it's not put in the same class as downloading. That's illegal as usual.

So while the uploader may well be a criminal according to Swedish law, due to the design, that'll probably be very time consuming to prosecute those. Much like individual BitTorrent original seeders. You don't see those punished often. And all Swedish users of the site would use it legally. I'm not sure where the host would stand legally, but then again, I'm not sure TPB will be the hosting server either, or if it'll be distributed to a third party (read: country).

So, once again, they're seeking to enter a legal loophole much like The Pirate Bay currently operates within the boundaries of a Swedish "BBS law" where it's OK to host non-copyrighted content, which .torrent files of course are.