Tuesday, May 20, 2008

ControversyTube.com

Most of us visit youtube at least one a week for watching some video or the other. The youtube service was launched with the intent of enabling amateur videographers to get their content online and get some viewership and critical feedback, maybe. But what it has turned out into is the dumping yard for anything and everything legal and illegal, just like bittorrent. :-)

Seeing the obvious interest of people to watch free TV or movie via youtube, the big honchos like viacom and warner brothers have a dedicated team (some warm bodies) of online drones/bots whose only job is to pull down content on sites like youtube that are a copyright violation. Youtube, being the good guy here, pulls down the content the minute someone raises an objection. We, of course would like to see the "objectionable" data... always! So, here is something that comes close to doing this for us, YouTomb. This is a pet project inside MIT which keeps track of all the videos that are pulled down from youtube because of copyright violations.

While this is nice start, I think there is scope for another niche web2.0 company to grow here. :-) Yes, I have another product idea and you can blame it all on this conference call I am stuck in, which I don't want to be in!! Anyway, getting back to topic. What folks (definitely me) would be more interested in would be to view these oh-so-bad banned content. Since it is copyright violation content, no legit site would want to host it. But since almost all such content is usually downloaded by someone and uploaded somewhere, there should be a bunch of insignificant sites/blogs that have the same content. The media mafia is unlikely to have the patience, energy and drive to bring down each and every such lowly site/blog. So, what we need is a service which can keep track of the content that is brought down because of copyright violations and then crawl the world wide web and find all the sites that have this content mirrored.

Since I have the time to come up with such ideas (mostly useless) with no intent of ever doing anything else with the idea, I need a sounding board, and I am gonna start being active here. :-) . Of course, feedback from the readers of this blog is always welcome! :-)

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