http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/news/916532/Pirate-Bay-rolls-streaming-video-website/LONDON - Despite an unfavourable court ruling, resulting in a £3m bill in damages and year long prison sentence, The Pirate Bay is thumbing its nose at copyright holders once more, this time gunning for YouTube with the launch of a free streaming online video service.
The project, called Video Bay (
http://thevideobay.org/), which has been under wraps for two years, was rolled out in an 'extreme beta' version, with a warning on the home page stating 'Don't expect anything to work at all'.
Regardless, the web buzzing with speculation about just what Video Bay will be capable of when it's ready to go live and what kind of precedent it sets for the world of online video.
In theory, the site will allow unrestricted, free access to streaming video content in blatant violation of copyright law.Video Bay will be user driven, much like YouTube, but will be based on HTML5, the next platform in html coding that will likely replace the need for third-party plug-ins like Adobe Flash.
To use Video Bay, users must have an HTML5 compatible browser, which include Firefox 3.5, Opera 9.52, Google Chrome 3 or Safari 4 (sorry IE users).
The site was initially rolled out to the public a couple of weeks ago, who have been busy uploading video and audio content. Users can sign up for the service and browse through the content already uploaded, which feature music videos, and episodes from television shows like The Simpsons and Scrubs.
It's expected that full length pirated films will soon make their way to the website, despite The Pirate Bay's current legal mess with its flagship BitTorrent website.
At present, the website's functionality is spotty, at best. The Pirate Bay said it was launched as a work in progress, and would be complete "a year or five".
On the website, an introduction reads: "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."
The four founders of The Pirate Bay were recently denied a retrial bid in their copyright case against a number of companies in the film and recording industry.
The website connects BitTorrent networks, which allows users to download films, albums and television shows without having to host any of the copyrighted content.
In April the group was sentenced to spend a year in prison and required to pay £3m in damages. After the ruling, the company filed for appeal, citing that the judge in the case was biased.
