In a move that is as provocative as it is baffling, The Pirate Bay is starting its own video hosting site.
As you may have heard, the Pirate Bay guys are at something of a loose end and so to fill the time, they’ve flicked the switch on their announced video streaming service, The Video Bay, from ‘closed beta’ to ‘open beta’.
The service was announced two years ago, and a spokesperson for the site said that it would have ‘no censorship’ and that unlike YouTube, would not act as ‘moral police’. But after the announcement, it all went pretty quiet. That is until the Open Video Conference in New York City earlier this month where Pirate Bay creator Peter Sunde announced this new phase of the service to the assembled crowd.
“This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk encoding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site isn’t working properly,” he said.
Rickard Falkvinge, the head of Sweden’s Pirate Party, spoke to the BBC about the site, saying that it was another step in the “prolonged legal battle with the record industry”.
“It’s obvious that, given enough time, The Pirate Bay will win this war which will go on as long as the record industry has yet another penny to file a lawsuit. I think they [The Pirate Bay] are taking an important part in that battle, fighting for freedom of expression and culture against monopolistic companies,” he added.
Of course, from a layman’s point of view, it looks like The Pirate Bay have given their detractors a rather large weapon to use against them. Hosting torrent files is one thing, because you can legitimately claim that you don’t host copyrighted material, but a video hosting site is very different beast.
The site that the Video Bay is based on, YouTube, has been criticized and even sued a number of times by copyright holders, and while I’m not an expert on Swedish law, I can’t imagine The Video Bay will fare much better.
We shall just have to wait and see how this develops.
Source: BBC
Published: Jun 29, 2009 03:23 pm