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Comment by antiismist | Hacker News Reader

justin.tv is great for sports broadcasts. I don't get cable but I want to watch the Lakers in the playoffs. So I watch it on justin.tv (I find the link to the game on atdh.net). It's very useful for me.

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And also clearly illegal, they don't have the rights for that type of broadcast. It can't be advertised against and is the only content that people actually watch, two bad omens for JTV.

Yep. This is most popular way to watch European cycling events here in the States, short of paying for a subscription to CyclingTv.com or hoping for a legitimate stream from Versus of NBC Universal.

It could monetize really well, actually. I'm sure that jtv has already thought of this, but they can be the hulu of live broadcasts. I've seem ad overlays as well on Justin.tv for what it's worth.

(Also, copyright violation is not the same thing as "illegal". It is a civil violation.)

With 90% of traffic being foreign, the odds of being able to successfully monetize is slim.

And copyright violation is illegal and you can go to prison for it (though JTV has a good excuse in that it's user generated). Making it the cornerstone of your business is risky. People go to prison for copyright violations fairly frequently, the owners of EliteTorrents are a recent example:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/06/jury-convict...

One second there partner; I think you need to go back to law school on that one. It is certainly "illegal" to violate copyright law.

Illegal usually applies to criminal law, not civil law. I do know that there are some criminal copyright violations.

My point would be just that it's not proper to say that copyright violations are illegal because most copyright violations are in the realm of property law, not criminal law.

1) We're fully DMCA compliant.

2) The vast majority of our content is user created.

You make a platform really easy to illegaly carry live video and then skirt around the law because if you get caught in the act you nuke the feed. How awesome of you. If you looked at your site you could kill feeds left and right, they are obviously illegal. Why don't you do this? (Here's a guess--it would kill your business.)

Percentage wise I believe you that most of the content is user created. But attention wise it can't be close. Let's look at your "sports" section:

http://www.justin.tv/directory/sports

Right now there's a bootlegged feed of ESPN, a couple of soccer games you don't have the rights for and a variety of other content that is copyrighted. Those are the most viewed, your user generated content is being watched by no one.

You're running a scam.

(And for what it's worth, on the technical side I admire what you guys have done. I just think it's super shady to base your business on looking the other way when your users steal content. You're building an online cable network without paying for content.)

> If you looked at your site you could kill feeds left and right, they are obviously illegal. Why don't you do this? (Here's a guess--it would kill your business.)

Here's another guess: it would remove any hope of using common carrier status (or whatever the DMCA equivalent is called). Once you proactively identify infringing material, you become responsible for anything you don't remove, if I understand correctly. Taking on legal responsibility for any failure to notice a copyright-violating feed seems like a risk that a startup can't take.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi

"Finally, the service provider must not have knowledge that the material or activity is infringing or of the fact that the infringing material exists on its network."

I think part of being a DMCA compliant safe harbor is not knowing there is infringing material, if they remove stuff, that implies that they have the ability to know about the infringing material.

Its kind of a loophole in the DMCA.

You make a platform really easy to illegaly carry live video and then skirt around the law because if you get caught in the act you nuke the feed.

In other words, they do exactly the same thing as every other UGC startup, in every other medium.

Not really, but even so a bunch of wrongs don't make a right.

Also in this case the wrongs make up the vast majority of viewed content. Live video is much harder to police from a content owner's perspective and they know it. The lawyers gotta be out documenting shit during an event. Look what they require to take something down:

http://www.justin.tv/user/dmca

All that for stuff that a ten year old could tell is stolen. I have no respect for startups that base themselves on theft.

Not really

Can you be more precise? What are they doing that's different?

Not every other UGC site relies almost completely on plainly copyrighted content. Examples include: Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, WordPress, Yelp, etc. Scribd is a good example of a startup taking the JTV path and I think they are scum too.

You're evading my question, and I think you know it.

Let me make it clearer for you. How are JTV's copyright policies any different from those of other UGC sites?

There can be identical policies that produce different results. For example, a startup telling you which intersections were best for hailing a cab could have the same TOS as one telling you the best intersections to score drugs; the latter would be more likely to assist in breaking the law.

They knowingly ignore massive copyright infringement. They have negligently let their service be overrun by copyright infringement. The primary use of justintv is for copyright infringement, the UGC content is secondary. Pretending their site is just another average UGC site is intellectually dishonest.

They have exactly the same copyright policy as any other UGC site. They take down infringing stuff when they're told about it.

What's intellectually dishonest is to pretend there's such a thing as an "average" UGC site. The others vary enormously in the amount of copyrighted stuff they have on them.

"They have exactly the same copyright policy as any other UGC site. They take down infringing stuff when they're told about it."

Looks like an Everybody Else Is Doing It argument. What makes "the same copyright policy as any other UGC site" morally acceptable? It's easy to read that as "we'll make money from your content until you catch us".

All that for stuff that a ten year old could tell is stolen. I have no respect for startups that base themselves on theft.

I guess you're hoping that if you repeat this often enough we'll forget that copyright infringement isn't theft? Sadly, that will work on a fair percentage of folk, which is why I feel it's important to reply with something like this at least some of the time.

All the top streams are sports, movie, and tv shows. That's a fact anyone can see for themselves. And it would be easy for you to remove this stuff but you benefit in terms of popularity and ad revenue so you don't. Pretending like you don't see it or that the site is popular because of its UGC content is just dishonest. The idea that you're protected by the DMCA is your opinion not a legal fact.

The idea that you're protected by the DMCA is your opinion and not a legal fact.

How do you know they haven't consulted a lawyer about this?

(we have, of course).

These are not only omens for Justin.tv but also for any new media intermediary, such as youtube or vimeo, where even if their ToS prohibits X, users continue to violate X on a day-to-day basis. . .users of these sort of services are almost always ignorant (except the users who study or know copyright law) or simply don't care how or where they're republishing content of entertainment merit, and I don't think they should. DMCA is a pain in the ass, and unfortunately it results in a superfluous amount of content and user banishment.

This omen reminds me a lot of what occurred in TPB trial.

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