Mike Griffiths

The Pirate Bay (TPB) is the world’s most high-profile file-sharing web site. Recently its owners have been in the news a lot due to them being caught and prosecuted under copyright law by the music industry.

The web site’s owners were taken to court, found guilty and sentenced to one year in jail in April. However, they are currently still free men.

As well as the one year jail sentence, they were also made to pay $4.5million in damages.

The Pirate Bay owners are notoriously known for hating the record companies. When they were ordered to pay the damages they put notifications up on the pirate bay web site asking for donations. All of the donations were made in $1 pieces. The individual donations were then sent onto the music companies’ solicitors. Because the amounts are in such small denominations, it actually cost the record companies money in order to process all of the individual amounts, so where they did actually pay the damages, the record companies made no money from it.

The latest move from the owners of the web site is to open a new service called the Video Bay. Essentially it is an illegal version of YouTube that allows users to stream copyrighted material from the web site.

The Video Bay will be using the latest version of HTML, called HTML 5. HTML 5 comes with new elements such as video and audio, which will stream audio and video media through the browser without the need for any additional plug-ins like Flash or Windows Media Player. The only problem with this is that the users must have an up-to-date browser to use it – probably not an issue for The Video Bay’s userbase, but for the majorty of websites this is something to take very seriously.

You can read more about the new HTML 5 elements here on my blog where I run through each element and the new attributes associated with it.