Tube site question... legality and ethics
 

Maybe I'm missing something here, but wanted to get some feedback

I got hit up by someone yesterday from a different board asking to trade traffic with my tube site (btw, which is all 30sec to 2 min videos provided by a sponsor). I looked on his site and it has a lot of 15+ minute videos.

I told him no way, but what is the point of having 15-30 minute long videos on his site and he told me the script he bought, scrapes a number of larger tube sites and he is merely hot linking to their videos.

Yes, I know this is not something new, but from a legal stand point could he get busted for having stolen content play on his site even though he is hot linking? Seems to me he could...

Also, what about the original tube site hosting the content, I'm sure they would get pissed about this guy hot linking to his videos, but he said he has been doing it for months and no one has said a word.

Is this the new trend? I found two scripts that out of the box offer this service (one is priced around $400 too) that does this.

From my perspective, Im not about giving away porn for free yet trying to make a living off sign ups, but when companies are pushing software like this that most people can easily afford, it now takes our current tube problem and makes it ten time worse.

With that, anyone know what can be done about hot linking my videos? I host a lot of them on my own server and fuck if im going to pay for some free loader to play them on his site with his affiliate links

That's hilarious.

ask redtube... they seem to know how to stop hotlinking or my programmer just sucks ass.

Why are you concerned about hotlinking? BW... the idea of a tube is to give shit away for free... seems a bit like a double standard to be pissed if someone hotlinks your vids right? Don't allow others to embed which would defeat the purpose of viral tube traffic.

I doubt many ppl will hotlink videos less than 2 mins long.

Hi bossku69, an open-source solution would be to use LightTPD along with the mod_sec_download and mod_flv_streaming modules. Ordinarily it's difficult to prevent hotlinking of Flash videos as the Flash players do not send any referring information (and therefore cannot be blocked by .htaccess). With LightTPD and the aforementioned modules, you'll be able to create temporary links to the video content that expire after a period of time.

Now, this probably can't prevent certain programs from sniffing the real link/location of your Flash video files, and so you may want to implement some sort of script or script modification that creates and modifies symlinks to your content at certain intervals, so if a site does successfully leech your videos, they won't be able to do so for very long.

Hopefully someone more experienced with this can come in and offer more suggestions or correct me if I'm wrong. Also, if you need a solid host for your tube sites, give Dedico.com a try :thumbsup

There is a difference between allowing other to embed certain videos and jacking ALL of your content.

I have no problem if someone wants to embed a few videos here or there, but to scrape my entire site is not cool. These programs out of the box, you put in just the URL and scrapes all their videos.

Not necessarily. I use two scripts, one that converts FHG into flv videos that I host, and other that publishes them into a better interface (until the latter script can handle both).

Im hosting over 5000 videos between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. I have no problem with the hosting bill as long as the visitors are going to MY site seeing MY ads. Fuck if im going to pay the bill for someone else to jack my shit.