In light of the recent TVLinks shut-down in the UK, I thought we should take a look at the many other cases of lawsuits and shut-downs pertaining to copyright violations on video sites that we have covered here on WebTVWire.

Many sites which link to pirated and copyrighted material on the web have been threatened, and in most cases successfully stopped from the copyright violations they were involved in.

Here are a few discussions on the subject:-

• PeekVid to Get Sued to Oblivion? MPAA files lawsuit
• DRM & Copyright Destroying Internet Television?
• MahTV Shutdown by the MPAA
• TV Show Directory QuickSilverScreen.com Threatened by Fox
• Linking Law Expert Dr Stephan Ott Talks About Linking To Pirated Video
• Judge Denies Appeal that Deep Linking Directly to Video and Audio Streams is Not Illegal
• Linking to infringing content is probably illegal in the US

Another multi episode show has today been announced as a MySpace exclusive. 

Following in the wake of Quarterlife, which we spoke about here on WebTVWire last month, Roommates is the newest show to be shown on MySpaceTV, News Corp’s answer to YouTube.

It will share the series out to the social network’s multi-million-strong viewership over the course of some 45 days (weekdays only) in brief three-minute snippets. 

Each new episode will be shown on MySpaceTV starting at 4pm EST, Monday through Friday.

A host of media companies have launched a new push to force user generated content sites such as YouTube to tighten up their copyright controls.

Disney, CBS, NBC, and Fox, along with Microsoft, Veoh, and Dailymotion, have jointly issued a document they call “User Generated Content Principles.” 

In a nutshell, the guidelines call for sites hosting UGC to automatically block content that matches copyrighted material submitted by copyright owners to a back-end database.

Nothing New

These aren’t new proposals—the studios have been pressing for automated filtering on YouTube and the like for quote some time now. But the presentation of these proposals as a set of “principles” is new, and somewhat misleading.

Typically, we see voluntary guidelines issued by industry groups as a self-regulatory measure, to ensure best practices are followed in the absence of regulation. But here, it’s not self-regulation—the biggest names in the UGC business aren’t there. 

Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo are all noticeably absent from the video sharing services, as are a number of other channels for UGC, like blogs and other forums that allow the posting of media. Those who are present are those who would seek to regulate the business of others.

The massively popular video streaming site TVLinks was last night shut down by British authorities and the owner, a 26 year old man from Cheltenham, England was arrested on copyright violation charges.

TVLinks started as a small niche site offering links to other sites on the Internet where you could watch television programmes and movies. As is always the case with a great idea, word soon got around until the site became too popular for its own good.

Viacom, Disney, Microsoft, and MySpace all have a couple of things in common?

Apart from being huge media companies with a lot of financial clout, they also want to set some “guidelines” in order to maintain copyrights online.

The four (seems a strangely small group considering the proportions of the effort, no?) have joined hands to work to establish a commonly acceptable system which will purportedly “stop pirated material” from proliferating and generally protect copyright rules from widespread subversion.

And all four will fail at the job. Well, okay, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. To tell you the truth, I’ve no clue how things will shake out. 

But I kind of find it troubling that corporations are working in unison on technologies to address the issue of peer-to-peer piracy and whatnot, rather than, you know, the institution whose role it is to protect copyright law: government. 

So troubling, in fact, that one can’t help but get a little suspicious about the true intentions of this wee project they’ve all bandied together on.

Tubecast.tv is a new Internet video/TV startup currently in alpha testing. I stumbled across this great find at the Museum of modern betas (MOMB).

The simplicity and elegance of the site grab you instantly, and best of all anyone can enjoy it now.

This classy online video development essentially grabs content from other sites like YouTube and Veoh, and layers a user interface atop the content.

From a writer’s perspective I was excited that I had perhaps lucked out for our readers and found something overlooked by everyone. 

Not surprisingly, Michael Arrington and TechCrunch skipped over it in late August and did a nice review. I agree with Michael’s assessment that Joost and other Web TV will eventually have to incorporate simple video aspects like this to be feasible in the short to medium term.

Under pressure from movie studios, record labels and their friends on Capitol Hill to filter out copyrighted material, YouTube’s parent company Google has developed a tool that will likely restrict the flow of legal content over the Internet.

YouTube introduced the beta version of its ‘video identification’ system a few days ago, the purpose of which is to control the amount of infringing material that appears on the site. 

This raises the bar for each and every entity that serves as a conduit for copyrighted works online, and was most liekly prompted by the $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom.

How It Works

A copyright holder uploads its works into a reference database, which then generates identification files by which uploaded videos are matched. When a user uploads a video onto YouTube, that video is matched with the identification file. 

If there is a “match” (more on that later), then the video is subject to whatever action the rights holder has decided to apply to it; for example, it could be blocked, “tracked” or “monetized.” If the video is blocked, the user will be notified, and can immediately contest the claim by clicking onto a link. 

Once YouTube receives the user contest, it will put the video back on the site. At that point, notice and takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) would kick in. 

If the copyright holder continues to want the video removed, it would have to send a takedown notice required by the DMCA. The user can send a counter-notice, whereupon the video would be reinstated, etc.