It was just over two years ago that I posted a brief note on a daring side project from Pirate Bay, the organization best know for its law-evading BitTorrent filesharing site. The project was to build a kind of YouTube-esque video streaming site, but one that operates outside of mainstream copyright law. Today we learn that the project, dubbed “The Video Bay”, lives on.
“On The Video Bay users can share video clips without having to worry about getting them taken offline due to copyright violations, true Pirate Bay-style”, writes TorrentFreak. There’s no official date as to when the site will open fully to the public or a fixed development schedule. Instead a message posted on the site asks users for patience.
“This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly”.
As I noted back in May 2007, The Video Bay is an ambitious project, not just from a technical point of view – coding, bandwidth etc. – but also legally.
It’s hard to imagine how a lawless ‘YouTube’ could survive in a world where IP laws are increasingly harmonized across borders, and countries have an incentive to comply with the World Trade Organization. But then again, The Pirate Bay has a pretty good track record of evading US lawyers.
