• by Shankar Gupta , November 29, 2006

Since last year, when YouTube introduced its intuitive video-sharing platform, Web users have had unprecedented access to a wealth of video clips--including material owned by major entertainment companies.

Finding all of that material, however, has proven cumbersome, requiring users (and entertainment companies hoping to enforce their copyrights) to search a variety of sites and sources for the clips.

Now, however, a site, DailyMotionMovieVids.com, directs Web users to movies that are available for free online. Two companion sites, DailyMotionEpisodes.com and DailyMotionMusic.com, do the same for TV shows and music. The movie site quietly launched last week, while the music site went live earlier this month. All three sites, known as the DM* Network, rely on users to contribute information about where on the Web particular movies, TV shows and music can be found.

As of Tuesday, the DailyMotionMovieVids.com directed users to free streams of movies like "A Scanner Darkly" and "V For Vendetta." The clips themselves resided on YouTube ("Alien vs. Predator," "Bend it Like Beckham," "City of Angels"), MySpace ("Army of Darkness," "Clerks," "Dumb and Dumber") and Bolt ("A Scanner Darkly," "Dogma," "Ghost in the Shell," and "X-Men 3"), among other sites.

All of the movies linked to on the site appear to be pirated, which raies the question of how long the DailyMotion sites will survive. While the major entertainment companies haven't yet complained to the sites' administrator, Google--which supplies AdSense ads to the sites--has raised objections.

On Nov. 19, Google said it would no longer serve ads to the TV-related site, DailyMotionEpisodes.com, because it allegedly violated Google's terms of service, which state that ads won't be served to pages with "illegal content"--but the company appealed and that decision didn't take effect. This week, the network received a similar threat from Google, which the administrator is also planning to appeal.

The DailyMotionMovieVids.com site states that it's legal because it isn't hosting any videos, just directing users to them. But Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the law is murky. "The current legal situation is that it's a little bit of a mix," she said, adding: "It's unclear what the law is going to be for copyright protection in the context of linking."

Aaron Cohen, CEO of Bolt Media, said that sites like DailyMotionMovieVids.com highlight the inadequacy of the current system, where under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, copyright holders must issue individual takedown notices for pieces of content. "If a U2 video is uploaded to Bolt and we're asked to take it down, we take it down immediately, as is our obligation under the law," he said. "But five seconds later, someone else can put it up and Universal is obligated to notify us again to take it down. That is an obviously absurd process."

For now, it's unclear whether the major entertainment companies that own the videos will take action against DM* Network. But Universal Media Group has recently sued Bolt, as well as Grouper and MySpace, for copyright infringement.

Bolt's Cohen added that his company and other social networking sites are working to develop the technology that can quickly identify and take down copyrighted video. "The filtering technology is not in place for the movie and television industry," he said. "That's where we have issues, and we have to work on that."

Currently, the DM* Network is monetized solely by AdSense, which nearly makes up the cost of bandwidth, according to a site administrator who asked not to be named. The remaining costs are made up by himself and others out of their own pockets.