Streaming Video

there are many ways to watch copyrighted material on the internet, whether it is a tv show, movie or a music video you can find pretty much anything out there if you look hard enough and have enough time. One of the increasingly popular ways of distributing material is to 'stream' it from a website. Since the growth of ADSL, more and more people at home have the capabilities to stream video, the most popular website for this is YouTube.

YouTube are part of a multi-million pound company, so they have a lot to lose if they neglect their responsibilities as a video-hosting website. This means that it would be extremely difficult to find copyrighted material on there as they have numerous measures to prevent this, such as people to trawl forums and the website itself for any such material and only allowing users to upload 10 minute videos unless they have a special membership. Despite this, YouTube and other similar video hosting sites still have copyrighted videos on them, and always will.

How do these films get below the radar? The user often posts them under completely different names to what they actually are, or use a code for the title, for example if they were to post the 3rd episode from the 5th series of The Simpsons they may put "TS S05E03" or something similar, that way people searching YouTube for The Simpsons will never return the result they are looking for.

The user still has to have some way of finding these files though, so that is where 3rd party websites and forums start to appear, such as the recently deceased tv-links.co.uk. Moderators and contributers to these sites search the web and other forums for direct links to episodes and films, then simply list the links in their website. In theory this is taking advantage of a loophole in the system, as they are not actually hosting the videos, so are not liable. The same excuse that torrent websites use, which i will look at later on.