Think Before You Buy Sites Embedding Copyrighted Video!

Ok, so lately I have been seeing a lot of sites up for sale that specialize in streaming video. These sites usually will link to videos through services like Daily Motion, Veoh, YouTube, etc. I often see the people selling the sites tell the bidders that there are no legal risks involved. Buyers beware, there are many legal risks involved in running a site like this.

Just because you are not hosting the copyrighted material, does not mean you are not going to be held responsible at some point in time. U.S. copyright laws (among other countries) give companies the right to take action against you and all involved. Remember in the U.S. you can sue for anything, it is up to the courts to decide the outcome.

The reason linking to copyrighted material is illegal is because of what we call 'inducing infringement' or 'contributory infringement'. This is giving your sites users the means to obtain copyrighted material illegally. It is clearly stated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Section 1201 proscribes devices or services that are primarily designed or produced to circumvent copyrighted material are in violation of the DMCA.

Upon discovery of your site, the copyright holders have a few different courses of action they can take. Firstly, they can ignore your website, but this is highly unlikely because most media corporations take copyright violation very seriously. These companies have teams of lawyers who specialize in this stuff.... you do not.

The second option is for them to send you a take down notice, which is there way of 'politely' asking you to take their stuff of your site. There are however different types of take down notices... for instance, if Fox wanted to, they could ask for you to politely remove all of the Fox related content. But if they wanted to take it a step further though, they could go as far as too ask for you to remove your entire website from the internet.

The third option is for the companies to come after you directly with a law suit. As stated above, these companies have teams of lawyers that specialize in this. You really don't want to mess with these guys. Even if you did somehow manage to convince the courts that you are in the clear of committing any type of copyright infringement, your legal fees would be outrageous. If served with a take down notice, do yourself a favor and comply.

You do not want to be in the position of losing a court battle to these people. If you were to lose such a battle, your site would be taken off the internet and domain seized by ICANN. There would probably be a pretty hefty fine that you would have to pay them. These fines could easily run up into hundreds of thousands of dollars. On top of that you would have a large legal fee to pay to your lawyers... and money isn't the only thing to worry about. If charged, you could face jail time. Again, not worth the risk.

In no way am I siding with the media corporations. I personally believe that sites like this should exist. I am just trying to inform people planning on buying/running these types of websites that there are huge legal risks involved.

Another thing worth mentioning is that this violates Google's terms of service for adsense, they will ban your account upon discovery of the content.

Note that services like Hulu do not get grouped into this category, as all content is uploaded by the legal copyright holder, and Hulu's terms of service allows you to legally embed content.

Sites With Information:
http://www.icann.org/general/litigation.htm
http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

 

No one here cares about your opinion, especially when you post it on the "Sites for sale" forum. Your thread belongs in the off-topic area. I've ran multiple streaming sites, and I've only encountered legal issues once, and it was quickly taken care of by removing a few videos. Stop scare mongering people.

 

Remotay,
First of this isn't my opinion, this is fact. I am not trying to scare anyone off, I just think it is outrageous that the people selling these websites are claiming that the sites are completely legal and face no legal recourse. And this is in the sites for sale forum, because it is informing bidders that they need to be careful with these kinds of sites.

 

Firstly 'Remotay' what qualifies you to say nobody cares?
Everybody cares because the same question is asked time and time again in this forum. I would not be boasting about having no problems if I were you, as these things tend to come back and haunt you

This is an issue that needs dealing with and there are other opinions apart from yours so please do not speak for me saying 'no one cares' as I quite definately do care if I am to spend my hard earnt income.

Regards
JohnT

 

Thanks wordsmith. I just want to make it clear I am not trying to scare people off from running these types of sites, but like wordsmith said, I think people should know what they are getting into when they invest their money into something that is potentially going to get shut down in following months. I wouldn't have make a post like this if the people selling the sites would just be honest instead of writing that the sites are 100% legal. That is just dishonest and not fair to the people who are investing in these websites.

 

The same goes for most (if not all) RSS fed sites for sale here. Using someone's RSS feed and publishing it again, like most of the celeb sites, is illegal and will leave you open to some nice take down notices when the RSS owners find out.

As always it's buyer beware when dealing with web sites, do your homework before you buy something that could land you in all sorts of trouble.

 

It boggles my mind that these things have been pointed out so many times with cases to show that it happens and yet nobody really believes it. Yes, most sites do get away with it, and simple takedown notices are much more likely than lawsuits. But is it worth a $10k plus fine for a $250 dollar site that generates $100 or less a month? Not in my mind. One thing I would point out is that criminal charges are very unlikely. They are reserved for gross infringers (usually that directly benefit from the infringement like bootleggers, not indirectly from ads).

Two examples I like to use are the tab sites that were up for years and people thought they were perfectly legal because nobody came after them. Really, the music industry decided not to go after them until they did. Suddenly most were shut down within a week. The second is the college students that got sued for downloading mp3s. Sure, statistically you weren't likely to get sued, but those that did sure got screwed.

 

isnt legal even if the site is hosted outside of USA? ive read it in somewhere..

 

There are some places that you can live that currently do not have laws against this. But most (even Sweden) are looking into changing that.

 

Is anyone familiar with Perfect 10 vs Google? The case is signficant to this thread's subject as it deals with in-line-linking.

Law is pretty interesting to get involved with. I highly recommend anyone to study it.

 

Good point! There are many things that are now illegal that a lot of people still think is perfectly legal. Do some research before you get burned!

Thanks Sarah, glad to hear someone finds it informative/useful. Thanks for moving it to legal, I debated whether I should put it here or on the 'buy, sell, trade' section since it really is about the people who don't do research before buying these types of sites. Now I can just link here if someone claims their site is 100% completely legal. I feel this is just as bad as scamming because most know that is not the truth. I have seen these sites go for upwards of $2000 only to be taken down a few months later

Exactly right, the chances of being sued are slim, but those college students never saw those lawsuits coming over the mp3's. Don't have one of those mentalities that you believe it can't happen to you. Right now the MPAA and media companies are stronger then ever and are looking to set examples. You really don't want to be one they pick on.

Yes a lot of (if not most) countries have very strict laws pertaining to copyright laws, but I didn't want to mention that because I am no expert on world law, and I didn't want someone coming here to tell me how wrong I was. But yes even if the servers are outside of the USA, you still run a risk of being given a take down notice, and being sued. Actually the chances are greater this way, because the MPAA and media companies can't go after the servers (since they are not in the US), so they go after the little guy in the states, where they do have authority, and shut them down.

Ya again, most countries are really starting to catch up with the internet, and are actively putting laws into affect to stop these types of activities.

Ya law really is an interesting subject, along with government. I learned both of these things through basic college classes, and I was really surprised because I hated everything about high school. I was so surprised at how interesting this type of stuff could be.

If you are interested in law though, Perfect 10 vs Google is a great case to study. This really puts the DMCA into perspective. A mens magazine actually tried to sue Google for indexing their pages and posting thumbnails of their copyrighted images. Luckily Google came out on top due to the fair use act, but the case was almost awarded to Perfect 10. This shows how dangerous this type of stuff can be. If Google can almost get sued, why can't you? Google has teams of highly paid lawyers, you do not, and they were under fair use act, and video sharing does not fall under this.



If anyone has any corrections or additions that they would like me to make, please let me know so I can properly address them!

 

Yeah. Law is very interesting. Boring too. I like to poke in these type of threads just to see how people think. I'd just want to add...

*Most people don't realize that the Fair Use Act is merely a defense, not a right.

 

Yeah I am seeing all these Naruto and Anime video sites for sales lately. They are just a suit waiting to happen. They are very illegal and imho should be removed from the sales area as warez. It doesn't matter that the videos are hosted by YT or whatever video service.

 

anyone here knowns in what countries this is legal? in india is?

 

The language of both the 1957 Copyright Act and the 2000 Copyright Act in India seem to suggest that it would be illegal to do this in India. I do not know whether it has been tested in court. Furthermore, usually only the copyright owner can file a complaint, so if they are using things that are owned by entities outside of India, it might be less likely that such a complaint will be filed (unless an organization like the MPAA is involved - they have enough money and lawyers all over the place).

 

Ya I am not sure about India, but they are pretty tech savvy over there, so I would assume they have some sort of legislation in place to protect copyrighted material. Like bluegrass said though, if the site deals with movies, the MPAA comes into play, and they have a lot of power in a lot of countries because the fact that many movies are distributed world wide.

 

Great post and great topic, Matthew. I do agree that running sites that scrape their video content from other sites is a legal area that's coming under growing scrutiny and to run such a site without having any knowledge of the possible legal ramifications is something people could easily blunder into and before long, find themselves on the wrong end of legal action.

 

You can always ignore a take down notice if you don't live in the US and hope it goes no further but from my perspective it's just not worth it. It's very easy for someone to complain to Google and you'll get your account banned for using Copyrighted material.

 

Not to mention that many hosting services in other countries comply because they do not want to be seen as willing participants to copyright infringement. Because the next step after a DMCA is a lawsuit, and most countries do respect most other country's copyright.