Intellectual Property Law

Pirate Bay Unveils YouTube-Like Site

By David Kravets

This is not your parents’ YouTube.

This is VideoBay, a YouTube-like service without the worries and hassles of those annoying copyright takedown notices.

And if you haven’t guessed by now, behind the service is The Pirate Bay. The new site, according to its operators, is in “beta extreme.”

“Don’t expect anything to work at all,” a message on the site reads.

The announcement of the “beta extreme” version of VideoBay comes as the four founders of the Pirate Bay face a year in prison following their April convictions for facilitating copyright infringement at the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker. The
Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak “that there is still a lot of work to do behind the scenes. The encoder is not finished yet and he design is also a work in progress.”

Notwithstanding the convictions and likely appeals, The Pirate Bay site continues to operate with more than 20 million users. Instead of licking their wounds, the operators instead are flipping a bird of sorts to prosecutors and the content industry.

Two weeks ago, they launched a VPN service promising to make file sharers and other internet users more anonymous online. About 180,000 people have signed up for the $7 monthly service.

In addition to jail time, the defendants in April were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures for facilitating copyright infringement.

Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in April, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation.

The April verdicts were on appeal amid allegations the judge who presided over the case was biased because he was a member of pro-copyright groups. That appeal was rejected, however, and the operators are expected to appeal the case on a host of other grounds.

The biggest contention concerns claims by the site’s operators that they cannot be guilty of infringement because Pirate Bay points the way to where copyrighted music, movies, games and software can be had for free, but does not physically host the content.

See Also:

• Pirate Bay Retrial Denied
• Pirate Bay Launches VPN Service
• Iran Activists Get Assist from ‘Anonymous,’ Pirate Bay
• The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome
• Facebook Divorces Pirate Bay
• Judge Reviewing Pirate Bay Trial Bias Is Removed for Bias

Full post as published by Threat Level on June 29, 2009 (boomark / email).