COPYCENSE

“Two services run by two people in Australia are giving people new ways to access and use video content from sites like YouTube and Google Video, and copyright holders may well find themselves up in arms about it.

“Known as Peekvid and Keepvid, the sister services are designed, respectively, to aggregate and index copyrighted YouTube content, and allow users to rip content from YouTube, Google Video and other services to their hard drives.

“Thus, though YouTube prohibits anyone except legitimate rights holders — such as NBC Universal, EMI Records and many others — from uploading copyrighted content to its site, such content does get posted illegally, and these sister services make it possible to easily view, and download, a wide variety of such content. A recent survey turned up clips including World Cup highlights, Beatles and 2Pac Shakur music videos, episodes of “Seinfeld,” an episode of “Lost” and dozens of other TV shows and music videos.”

Daniel Terdiman. Service Lets People Rip Videos From YouTube, Other Sites. News.com. June 14, 2006.

CopyCense™: The law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.