Hi, I am thinking of starting a few free tube sites, each site would be focused on a specifc topic. My legal question is.. Am I allowed to gather hundreds of videos from other tube sites and place them on my site? The last thing I want is to spend tons of money building these sites only to end up getting a law suit or something of that nature? I see that 99% of the videos I see online are the same videos seen on hundreds of different sites... I am new to all this, any help / advise you can offer is really appreciated. I am trying to do everything right from the get go, not to have stress down the road.. Bottom line, how do I legally use other tube sites videos on my site ?? I will stucture my sites anyway I can to make sure I do it correct.. again thank you!! ,
Well, if you don't remove its copyright I think the owner will agree for usage and aside from that better contact big companies like megavideo, youtube, etc for approval.
No, you are not allowed to copy videos from YouTube onto your own "tube" site. http://www.youtube.com/t/terms Also note that some of the videos on YouTube and other services infringe copyright. YouTube has some protection from legal liability as an online service provider under the DMCA safe harbor provisions. However, that is only the case because they are not the ones uploading the videos and they follow the rules for notification of infringement and takedown of infiringing videos. That also has not prevented YouTube from being sued for billions of dollars by Viacom. That case is ongoing. There are probably ways of setting up your sites to minimize your risk for having your site shut down (best case) or being sued (worst case), but you need to talk to an attorney who specializes in intellectual property law to be sure that it's done properly.
are you going adult or mainstream? There are scripts that you can use to spider various tube sites for keywords and pull in the embeds. If you're using adult there's a $60 adult sponsor import tool I've been using. There's a demo of it up here: http://entertainmentscript.com/free/paid/ I'm using another tool right now to import embed videos from adult tubes. I have about $150 put into scripts so far but I can quickly build niche sites using specific keywords.