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Achtung! Criminal Investigation Against YouTube Underway in Germany
A criminal investigation has been launched against senior executives of YouTube and parent company Google in Hamburg, Germany, over allegations of copyright infringement, according to media reports from that country. The case started after a complaint by German music rights holders; Hamburg’s prosecutor has formally requested assistance from U.S. colleagues to compel YouTube to produce log files identifying who uploaded as well as who viewed 500 specific videos.
It’s unclear if the investigation will ever result in an actual court case. German prosecutors routinely throw out criminal investigations against copyright infringement, leaving it up to the parties involved to pursue civil lawsuits or settle out of court. The case does, however, once again demonstrate that Viacom’s massive one billion-dollar lawsuit isn’t the only copyright dispute Google has to tackle. There are regularly lawsuits all around the globe accusing YouTube and Google as running a worldwide video platform. Indeed, at a time when fragmented rights and universal access continue to collide, not irking rights holders seems impossible.
Is P2P Dead? Not So Fast
Network security vendor Arbor Networks has been drumming up publicity for its upcoming Internet Observatory Report this week. One of the widely reported tidbits is that P2P has “declined dramatically in the last two years,” and that it has been replaced by YouTube and other streaming video sites. Wired News took away from the report that “P2P is dead,” and ReadWriteWeb ran with the title: “So long, P2P, Hello Streaming Media.”
Findings like these are puzzling to anyone who’s been frequenting any of the big torrent sites lately. File sharers still seem to be as busy as ever, exchanging pretty much every movie and TV show episode you could think of. And didn’t Cisco just recently forecast that global P2P traffic will keep growing in years to come? Turns out, it’s all about how you interpret the numbers.
VideoWTF Wants to Answer All Your Video Production Questions
The folks behind the open-source video player Miro today launched VideoWTF, a site that aims to be something like a Yahoo Answers for the production side of all things newteevee. Don’t know what kind of camera to get? Unsure about whether to shoot interlaced or progressive? Looking for a place to chime in on the pros and cons of various MP4 flavors? Then VideoWTF is definitely worth checking out.
The site is built on Stack Overflow, an open-source CMS that combines Wiki-like functionality with a collaborative Q&A approach. In other words, anyone can post questions, provide answers, and vote on both — and everything can be edited to perfection. Stack Overflow has become really popular with programmers ever since it launched about a year ago, and the Miro folks believe that this format will be useful to video makers as well.
GoalBit: P2P Streaming Goes Open Source
Bandwidth-conscious broadcasters have a new way to distribute their live video streams. A group of Uruguay-based P2P researchers recently released the first English-language version of their open-source P2P streaming application, GoalBit. The application, which is based on a BitTorrent-like architecture, aims to compete with P2P streaming services like PPLive and PPStream by giving anyone looking to distribute their own live video programming a way to do so.
GoalBit, which is available for Windows and Linux, currently features just a handful of Uruguay’s TV networks streaming at fairly low bitrates. But the service looks promising nonetheless, and its extensive documentation could be intriguing to anyone interested in P2P streaming.
LimeWire in the Crosshairs of Anti-P2P Legislation
The House Energy & Commerce Committee is scheduled to mark up tomorrow a bill dubbed the Informed P2P User Act (H.R. 1319) that aims to prevent accidental file-sharing by mandating the display of clear warnings during the installation and usage of P2P software. Critics, however, fear that the final bill might end up going much further, regulating FTP clients, web browsers and even complete operating systems.
The bill could also have implications for anyone trying to leverage P2P for video distribution via solutions like the Octoshape Flash plug-in that was used by CNN.com to handle the Obama inauguration livestream traffic. The irony of the whole controversy is that much of the support for H.R. 1319 has been motivated by an almost religious disdain for just one file-sharing program in particular.
Fall TV Piracy Trends Don’t Support CBS’s Anti-Hulu Stance
It’s that time of the year again: TV networks are debuting new shows and hoping that established names will bring in huge ratings. These numbers became even more important than usual after Techcrunch published an internal email of CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith this week. Smith had forwarded to his staff a Contentinople article in which TV exes railed against Hulu, and suggested: “We should think about how hard it would be to prove that some ratings declines are a result of reckless hulu streams…”
CBS has been having a couple of good nights lately, with shows such as The Mentalist holding up against audience darlings like Grey’s Anatomy, and new shows like NCIS Los Angeles pulling in record audiences. But is that really because CBS is shunning Hulu and only posting full episodes of some of its shows to its own sites, CBS.com and TV.com? Is free online TV to blame for bad network TV premiere ratings? Take a look at fall TV shows popping up on torrent sites, and you’re gonna see a different picture.
Paramount COO Blames Drop.io, Boxee and Mininova for Piracy
Mike Masnick of Techdirt this week points us to a presentation made by Paramount COO Frederick Huntsberry, who was invited by the FCC to take part in a hearing entitled “The Role of Content in the Broadband Ecosystem.” Huntsberry used his presentation to offer a quick primer on piracy, showing the commission just how easy it is to pirate movies online. In fact, it’s so easy that Paramount apparently asked the FCC to keep the presentation off its web site so as to dissuade copycats. Because, you know, the first place movie pirates go when they’re looking for a copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster is FCC.gov.
But that wasn’t the only strange part about Huntsberry’s presentation. The Paramount COO seemed like he was out to pick a fight, alleging that a third of the world’s most popular web sites facilitate piracy. Huntsberry’s main point was that it’s getting easier every day to pirate Hollywood’s content, thanks to a new generation of sites and services. He showed off a web site with embedded Flash videos of major motion pictures as proof, but he also singled out three popular services that are all pretty bad picks to support his argument.
Skype-Joost Licensing Drama Déjà Vu for Friis & Zennström
Many people in the online video space are trying to make sense of the lawsuit Joost filed against former chairman and CEO Mike Volpi earlier today. The lawsuit has something to do with the supposed revelation of trade secrets in connection to the sale of Skype to a group led by Volpi’s new employer Index Ventures (which is also named in the suit, as it invested in Joost). But what does a failed video startup have in common with a VoIP operator? The answer comes down to one name: Joltid.
Joltid is a P2P technology provider incorporated in British Virgin Islands. It is owned by Joost and Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, and its tumultuous history makes the current fight with Volpi, Skype and eBay look like nothing special. Licensing conflicts that lead to the potential shutdown of a market leader? Been there, done that.
Music Videos Top YouTube, With Warner Losing Out
The major music labels are by far the most popular video publishers on YouTube, easily surpassing YouTube stars like Fred and MondoMedia by a few billion views, according to new stats from Tubemogul. Topping the list is Universal Music Group, which has been able to accumulate a total of 8.7 billion views on all of its official YouTube channels. ExpertVillage, on the other hand, which happens to be the most popular non-music publisher, accumulated only 770 million views — less than any of the four major labels as well as Disney offspring Hollywood Records.
The real loser of the list, however, is Warner Music. The label was able to accumulate almost 1.1 billion views until it pulled all of its content from YouTube earlier this year. Affected by the move were music videos from Madonna, Nickelback and Gnarls Barkley, among others. Since then, it has been losing out on millions of views each day, according to Tubemogul.
The Pirate Bay: Buyer Delisted, Founder Talks Strategy
The sale of The Pirate Bay hit another serious roadblock this week when shares of its prospective buyer, Global Gaming Factory X, were delisted from the Swedish stock exchange for allegedly misleading investors about the proposed transaction. AktieTorget claims that GGF misrepresented facts about its financial situation and its deals with the entertainment industry, though GGF CEO Hans Pandeya subsequently asserted to CNet that the transaction will nevertheless go through.
The entire saga over the sale is quickly becoming a kind of déjà vu. The Pirate Bay is not only known as the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker; its founders also gained notoriety for continuously announcing project after project, only to abandon most of them later on. There was the plan to buy an island, the idea to encrypt the entire Internet, the ad-supported music site Playable and the next-generation BitTorrent protocol, to name just a few. All of these non-starters did, however, help to keep The Pirate Bay in the news and accomplish things well beyond the stated aims of the The Bay’s site, as Co-founder Peter Sunde recently pointed out.
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