YouTorrent - Dicing with the law?
I have heard a lot of talk about YouTorrent.com- the acclaimed world’s first real-time torrent comparison search engine. The site helps Web surfers more easily find down-loadable content such as music, movies, games, and software and the site has achieved amazing growth, for example within 3 months of launching YouTorrent saw 2.7 million unique visitors in February who performed nearly 8.9 million content searches. Searches in March could top 11.3 million.!
YouTorrent indexes the vast array of digital content served up by 16 different speedy download sites known as torrents—a bit like a Google for peer-to-peer networks. Some of these sites, such as BitTorrent, now offer only legal content, while others are populated primarily with illegal copies of material.
The sites founder, one 22 year old Londoner is remaining media shy while he and his legal team sort out some outstanding legal issues regarding the very nature of his business - but his stance on this legality is that because his site doesn’t link users directly with users (like Napster did!) he thinks his service is legal. He backs up his claim with a comparison to Google - you can search and find illegal copied material via Google, yet record companies and movie makers don’t try and shut down Google ….
Copyright is a messy business and the law is the law with groundbreaking cases being won and lost each day it will be interesting to see how this site does.
Although the site is achieving millions of users, the website doesn’t actually make a penny (yet). The website which costs £250 a month to run could make a fortune with advertising so I’m not sure whats going on here …. the domain name was also taken but the owner negotiated a £10k sale.
Definitely one to watch!