The results of two recent court cases in the U.K. suggest that linking to but not hosting copyrighted content isn’t illegal, at least in Europe. Both TV-Links and the music-oriented OiNK have been cleared in the last month of the charges brought against them.

Linking Vs. Hosting

Hosting copyrighted content is illegal. That is an accepted part of the legal system. However, things get a little murkier and confused when a site is acting as a third-party, a go-between matching those hosting the content and those seeking it.

This has been tested in court a number of times, and the results have been mixed to say the least. In the U.S. it would appear linking is illegal, and sites such as Google only get away with it because of their Web directory nature, and even they have to remove links if asked to.

However, in the U.K., and potentially all countries in the European Union, linking to copyrighted material is not illegal.

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Online video is growing all the time, both in terms of popularity and frequency. Which is all good for the sector.

However, navigating the breadth of choice now out there and filtering the available content is getting harder as a result. Enter Magma, which acts like a Billboard Hot 100 for online video.

Online Video Growth

Online video has grown, and continues to grow, in popularity and breadth of content. The choice of sites, portals, content, and video clips now available is breathtaking.

There are the long-form video destinations such as Hulu and the BBC iPlayer, and short-form video factories such as YouTube and Dailymotion. Between all of them the range of content available to your average viewer is simply astonishing. It would take years to watch it all.

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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.

Dailymotion have announced that it has weaned $34 million from investors pockets during its second round of VC solicitations.

The company was once a news maker solely for its hand in the illicit proliferation of copyrighted content, but has in recent months (or is it years?) made great headway to cast the image of its former self aside and put its best, non-illegal foot forward.

It’s achieved this by using its records of viewer numbers, among other figures, to attract legitimate licensing deals and to secure very significant sums of funding.

Skype 3.5 for Windows was released to the public a few days ago, and to coincide with this upgrade, Skype and Dailymotion, an online video community have partnered together.

This new version of Skype adds videos from the video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Metacafe to Skype and will establish an exclusive channel. This will allow Skype users to share videos from Dailymotion’s Mood Channels.

Dailymotion, an online video sharing site boasting 4.7 million users per day, is reinforcing its goal to bring superior video content to new devices and broader audiences by launching an iPhone compatible version of the site.

The new site, which you can find at http://iphone.dailymotion.com/, features a simplified interface and Quicktime-compatible encoding – both features designed specifically to give a high-quality viewing experience to iPhone’s Safari web brower.

One cool feature is the ability to perform keyword searches for videos. The results are returned as thumbnail images with a play icon that can be directly tapped on the iPhone’s touch screen, launching the video in full screen mode.

DailyMotion, the Paris-based video hub, has struck a deal to license programming from production company, RDF USA. It is one of the first partnerships the site has entered into, in an attempt to supplement its masses of user-generated content.

Creating shows specifically for an Internet audience is also new ground for RDF USA – best known for supplying TV shows such as ABC’s Shaq’s Big Challenge.

Max Benator, head of RDF USA’s digital division said of DailyMotion:

“It’s really exciting because they have amazing traffic. It’s been untapped by the entertainment community, so we see this as a great opportunity to be one of the first producers to get access to those eyeballs.”