Hi i wanted to make a website that will have streaming tv shows on them. Is that illegal? I will link them from megavideo, or youtube. ? Thanks
It all depends, no one really knows for sure if its legal or illegal. I'm sure there will plenty of people on here to tell you its illegal. But guess what, youtube does it daily, DIGG, stumble upon, not to mention GOOGLE lists 100,000's of sites to watch & download copyrighted videos. The list goes on and on and on and on. But you will find 10,000 people here on DP telling you its illegal trying to put you in fear that you'll get sued or go to jail. In the end its like jaywalking, its illegal, but we all do every day and think nothing of it. Any cop can arrest anyone walking across any street. Its all up to that cop how much of a cop he wants to be. I suppose any law enforcement agency could go after any video site if they wanted to, but again it all depends on how much of a cop they want to be about it. It all boils down to "Time & Money" as well.
Despite the personal opinions of individuals, TV streaming sites are illegal. Google is protected from liability thanks to safe harbor laws. Whether or not you will get caught or sued is a whole different issue.
keep in mind, people/company's get sued all the time even with safe labor laws in place. plus what pan's out in the court is another thing altogether as well. Take for example, you can always use the dan brown di vinci code/holy grail court battle. After the verdict, apparently anyone who wishes to copy dan browns book is completely entitled to because he more or less already did so and got away with it. But on the other hand, if you ever get sued on the same issue's, you might not get the same verdict as he did even though the same exact thing took place. Its almost like a flip of the coin, it shows how "un-perfect" democracy law is and always will be.
So let me get this straight. You want to put other people's content on your own website without having any right to that content at all and you're asking whether or not that's illegal?
I'm pretty sure hes just curious to know if its legal or not for the simple fact that we all see tons of sites with copyrighted material everyday. Such as google and youtube etc. If they can do it, why can't I? And why do some people say its illegal but there are 100,000's of websites with copyrighted material on it? Another good example here would be "How come napster was shut down in the USA, but other USA peer 2 peer file trading clients haven't been shut down?" There is no good reason for it other than the fact that authorities do whatever they please regardless of what laws are in place. TIME & MONEY plays a huge factor here.
Again, youtube and google are protected under safe harbor laws, the OP's situation is totally different. Napster and bittorrent are totally different animals. The reason the bittorrent protocol is still alive is because it has many many legitimate uses. Debating injustice of the system does nothing to answer the question posed in the original post.
Its illegal no question. The only thing is its a lottery if the studio / copyright holders decide to prosecute you. i guess it depends on how popular / successful your site becomes. There are ways to protect yourself like using a Prepaid Visa or VCC to buy a domain name and not use your real contact details, then hosting in a countries like China or Sweden etc.. However its already a crowded space with 000's of sites dedicated to it, so unless you have a smart plan of attack I'd say tis pretty difficult to monetise, but good luck.
I have a lot of TV streaming sites. There is just thousands and thousands of people making sites that have direct streams to sites like Megavideo, Veoh, etc that I am not that worried about getting sued or anything. Usually only happens to sites that are very big.
That is pretty much the bottom line. There are thousands of people with sites like the one you are interested in starting that have never had any legal issues. There are also thousands that have been sued. I've gotten my own nasty lawyer letter from youtube for posting a music video I had no right to on my brand new account two years ago almost five minutes after posting it. Meanwhile friends of mine have hundreds of music videos live on their channels with no issues.