Hello, I am making a movie watching web site. I intend to get movies, that are available to be watched online, embedded into my website and users will be able to watch them for free on my website. For example, the movie "Inside Man" is on ustream.tv. I take Inside Man (which is being hosted on ustream.tv) and embed it into my site and allow people to watch it on my site for free. Is this considered piracy? And can Ustream.tv take any action against me for this? Please let me know, as I am very new to this field. Thanks, Theo.
Yes, this would be considered illegal since the sites main purpose was for infringing on intellectual property. Now if you wanted to post links to these movies off-site; you could probably get away with that as long as you have a disclaimer.
Video embedding is not illegal as long as you are not hosting the videos yourself. Don't forget to keep a disclaimer for the site.
What if my site was a middle man between the user and the site that hosts the movie? So some one would search for "movie" on my site. By clicking on the first result, they would be taken to ustream.tv to watch the movie (or whichever site comes in the search result). Would this be considered illegal?
You are the direct provider of the content and I wouldn't recommend you do this. If you do continue, you are breaching copyright laws by providing to a public audience. Then again you may have the argument that the content is not located within the boundaries of your server. Just be careful and keep your ass covered with a disclaimer saying that the content displayed on site is by no means an official representation of your site and the content is not powered by yourself.
By Streaming through your site so that the viewer does not have to go to ustream.tv you are depriving ustream frm potential income and they will at the least block you and you can also fully expect legal action against you. Read their terms of service and pay particular attention to 4 b
If it involves music or movies and you have to ask if it's legal, there is a 99% chance it isn't. Besides, unless you live in a developing nation you are not going to be happy with the money these sites make anyway.
ustream will take legal action on the OP? Definitely not. To the OP, ustream or any other video sharing type site wont take any action against you for embedding their content.
as mentioned before if the site links to an off-site video you might be able to get away with it. consider sidereel.com and yidio.com these are the 2 biggest players in the tvshow market and they do exactly that.