Pirates Sailing the Streaming Video Sea

Tired of downloading video content over peer-to-peer networks like eDonkey and BitTorrent? Prefer to just click ‘play’ and start munching popcorn? Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay for such a privelege — there are plenty of sites out there that make the latest television shows and movies available online via video hosting services like Google Video and DailyMotion according to Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson.

While sites like YouTVPC have a Wall Street Journal feature [Sub. Req.] to thank for mainstream visibility, I’ve been running across them months now. Post some content to Google’s servers, throw up a simple web site – covered in ads also served by Google in many cases – et voila, you’ve got a traffic magnet.

I once found myself at a site watching an embedded clip featuring all three hours of Manufacturing Consent, the Canadian documentary about Noam Chomsky’s institutional analysis of mass media, which was obviously an unauthorized copy (the audio slips sync about half way through). For some reason, I doubt Chomsky would mind.

I have a feeling this might just come up during Viacom’s suit against Google, and will certainly come up in conversations between content providers trying to divine how Google really feels about intellectual property rights. DailyMotion, a French company, has a much more YouTube-like interface but unlike YouTube either doesn’t receive or doesn’t comply with takedown requests, and hence you can still find the latest episode of 24 to watch online right now.

But what really interesting is that even if Google and DailyMotion suddenly bring down the hammer on these shenanigans, there’s no stopping someone from setting up their own video streaming service as easily as they would set up a site to index and embed content from other servers. EntertainmentScripts.com makes it easy to set up sites like SSUpload which feature all sorts of pirated content, according to FastCompany’s Lynne D. Johnson. And other developers are producing YouTube clones that will manage everything from uploads to the CMS to the player.

While the DOJ just scored a victory in securing the shutdown of Elite Torrents and conviction of Sam Kuonen, a 24-year-old Georgia man found guilty of uploading content in violation of the Family Entertainment Copyright Act. But it’s only the fifth such conviction, and there are literally thousands of sources of pirated content with new sources, and new methods, to distribute content popping up all the time.