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

Ironically

[Anonymous Coward]

Their version of YouTube will have no copyright infringement.

Re:Ironically

[elysiuan]

I'm curious how they are going to pay for the bandwidth to run such an endeavor. If the service is unreachable due to bandwidth issues then no matter how in demand it might be its not going to go anywhere. I'm sure that thepiratebay.org is a fairly high traffic site but essentially they are just serving lots of little static text files. Full, streaming video is going to be a bit of a jump from that.

I imagine they have some sort of person-network in place for bandwidth but how will that scale? Even things like topsites wouldn't use as much bandwidth as a youtube thing since they are hidden from the general public.

I'm perplexed.

Re:Ironically

[BakaHoushi]

If their name is any indication, they'll travel the seas, attacking any and every Bandwidth Ship that journeys by. Their fearless captain at the helm, they'll be like the Robin Hood of the seas and the Internet. For too long have the Bandwidth Barons held the vast majority of the Internets, and preventing the peasants from using theirs as they will. TV episodes and music clips for all who need them!

Re:Ironically

[Dragon By Proxy]

Ahhh, this sparks memories of the Crimson Personal Assurance...

Terrors, one and all, I tell ye.

Re:Ironically

[SlOrbA]

Bandwidth isn't issue in the Northern Europe.

Americans have cheap petrol and Scandinavians have cheap bandwidth.

Re:Ironically

[mrogers]

My guess is that they've implemented BitTorrent inside the Flash movie player.
"But Flash XMLSockets can only make outgoing connections to servers in the same domain that supplied the movie," I hear you cry.
"Ah," I respond sagely, "who determines what is inside thevideobay.org's domain if not thevideobay.org itself?"
"So they're assigning single-use dynamic DNS names to all their clients, but that doesn't solve the outgoing connection limitation," you protest.
"Hush little one," I reply with irritating condescension, "have you never heard of TCP simultaneous open with port prediction? It has an 85% success rate through domestic NATs and doesn't require raw sockets."

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!

Re:Something tells me a war is comming

[PopeRatzo]

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?

Here's a news flash for the "entertainment industry": I'd even PAY for such a site that doesn't have restrictions on hosted content. Pay AND click through to their advertisers. And because it's The Pirate Bay, I'd even tell my friends about it, because while Sony and iTunes and URGE and [Corporate Media Site Here] has always had some aspect of their service that was like a stone in my shoe, not to mention DRM (which is a deal-breaker for me under even the best circumstances], The Pirate Bay has managed to give this consumer exactly what he wants.

The big Entertainment/Industrial Complex just doesn't get that a satisfied customer is a happy customer, and happy customers will make you a success. So while they are all looking for new ways to frustrate the consumer, someone like The Pirate Bay has an opportunity to do it right.

The entire entertainment industry can't disintegrate fast enough for me. And you know what? There will still be music, and movies, and novels, and art. And the innovators, the creative souls will still make a living. Brittney Spears might become underemployed, but that's just the price of sucking.

pr0n

[Weston O'Reilly]

http://www.xtube.com/ and http://www.pornotube.com/ beat them to it.
Let's be honest, that's what we're talking about here.

Re:pr0n

[jythie]

The interesting question then will be, what kinds of porn will the censor?

pornotube and xtube _do_ have restrictions on what you can upload.

Re:pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like people with clothes, what kind of sick person would upload that in those sites

No censorship? Or no blame for censorship?

[Chairboy]

If the community controls it, that means censorship through mob rule. Post something from Ogrish? Maybe it'll get zapped even though that's a form of censorship.

Freedom of speech exists not so people can say things that other folks agree with, it's so that the unpopular opinions can exist too. That's why Illinois Nazis (I hate those guys) can do their thing, not just the civil rights marchers.

So, in practice, I bet there'll be little difference between the end product and YouTube. New boss will be same as the old boss, except instead of a room of guys with thin mustaches and black eyebands that cackle as they zap content, it'll be legions of computer users doing the same thing.

The site will be hosted on Sealand,

[markov_chain]

will run on Hurd web servers, and the first 1000 registered users will get free copies of Duke Nukem Forever!

Good

[damacus]

I'm sick of seeing worthwhile content getting pulled from valid sites. I remember looking for some video clips of Carl Sagan's appearances on Johnny Carson's show, and finding links to them in an index, but then getting there and finding that they had been pulled due to copyright restrictions.. I do hope this site can make it through. Like other posters mention, porn, especially pedo, may be an issue... but it's the cost of free speech. Althgouh I hope at least some level of self-censoring is put into place. I mean, there *has* to be a limit somewhere.... right?

Thanks

[HullBreachOnline.com]

Hey, thanks for the links!

Re:No censorship? Or no blame for censorship?

[glwtta]

So, in practice, I bet there'll be little difference between the end product and YouTube.

There'll be more porn. More, weirder porn. I'm looking forward to it.

Already a site that does this...

[satchmodian]

http://www.tv-links.co.uk/ Someone beat them to it.

Re:Already a site that does this...

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't host the shows. Those are linked to other pages, and some of them are broken due to the videos taken down from the source.

Re:Already a site that does this...

[eMbry00s]

mod parent up for truth, also to bring more publicity to tv-links.co.uk

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.

Potential Uses

[anjin-san 3]

If implemented properly this video service could be quite useful for pirate bay users. Imagine if you could use it to preview the quality of a movie before you torrent it. That would save a ton of wasted bandwidth previously used for mistakenly grabbing a camcorder-quality flick.

Of course the video quality would have to greatly surpass that of youtube for this to work...

Awww yeah!

[erroneus]

Thousands of young exhibitionist females out there making videos of their lovlies for all to see!!!

If TPB went legit...

[Podcaster]

I'm not sure that it is a good idea for TPB to try to build an real business running a proper internet service. The many software developers here on /. will tell you that there is a massive difference between what it takes to host the current TPB website, and what it would take to develop and deploy a youtube rip-off.

Developing such a site demands a return on investment, which calls for a business model and legitimate corporate structure, which will ultimately require them to protect themselves by censoring their users and removing illegal content.

Looks to me like the start of a slippery slope - if TPB ever goes legit it will bring about the end of an era. Until copyright law is reformed on the international stage, true rebels will have to remain completely outside of the system.

-P

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/>
*/

Update to sneak preview

[glassesmonkey]

Oops, it appears the flash player is still live: http://thevideobay.org/player/flvplayer.swf

You can also download some of the sample uploaded vids, but some are VERY weird.. probably nsfw.. you have been warned!
http://video01.thevideobay.org/vids/38.flv (replace "38" with any number)

Re:Niche Porn

[mux2000]

Stop it man, you're beating off a dead horse.

Re:Lawsuit

[I confirm I'm not a]

> And they thought the last lawsuit and raid were bad... I guess they can show the videos from their torrent site now. lol

They thought the last lawsuit and raid were bad?

"Just some stats... ... here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes - and how long it usually takes to fix:
Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days
Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days
The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days .. yawn."

Wow, they're hiding their ph33r well.

lol, indeed.

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.

Re:this is a non-event

[acidrain]

One last thing: Can I be the first to coin the term "The Pervert Bay."

Re:Paedophiles

[Carnildo]

Law enforcement agencies love the fact that the Pirate Bay doesn't censor child-porn torrents. You see, when you connect to a torrent, you tell everyone else connected who you are. The only thing law enforcement likes more than self-identifying criminals is self-convicting criminals.

I suspect there will be something similar for the VideoBay site.

step illustrated instructions

[nurb432]

If they are line drawings, sure it would be ok. That would be considerd ( sick ) art.

And dont forget, in some countries its a right to do things that isnt ok here ( whereever 'here' happens to be ). So who's 'rights' and 'morals' should prevail? Mine? Yours? How about the guy that thinks cows are his reincarnated relatives and is sacred so eating them is immoral? Or the guy that has a right to carry a firearm?

Nothing is black and white, unless we all end up living under ONE government at some point.

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.

Re:pr0n : A summery

[freakxx]

Listing by ranking (according to my experience):

1. http://www.myfreepaysite.com/ [you need to create a free account, that's all. Trust me, this is a great website]

2. http://www.youporn.com/

3. http://www.sexuploader.com/

4. http://www.shufuni.com/

5. http://www.xtube.com/

http://www.pornotube.com/ is a shit. Don't use it.

No, not Sealand

[CrimsonScythe]

They'll probably locate the servers in Arrrgentina, Arrrmenia, and Arrruba.