Safe access to video clips and films

Even those of us who are fairly savie with the risks when searching for material on the internet can get caught out at times, so what can we do to provide safe links to third party media. Using one of the large web services should be safe?

Youtube is now a major risk of credit card fraud if one is not careful. ANY site asking for a credit card simply to 'verify your country for licensing purposes' should be avoided like the plague. Search engines like google, bing and now even youtube who host links to these rogue sites should be taken to task for promoting fraud! But even where Paypal or Facebook is used to gain access the sites tend to simply be fronts for advertising rather than having any of the content they are advertising. So as with the artwork links directory, the plan is to provide a set of legitimate sources of all media.

Of cause the other area of concern with video and other media is the copyright aspects and sites that offer safe access even if that is paid for may not necessarily be legally supplying that content. There is a growing number of file hosting services which offer unlimited access for a monthly fee, normally using paypal or bitcoin so card details are protected, but the file content is essentially stolen from legitimate sources. A good example is the magazine services which are not actually provided by the publishers but obtain electronic copies of the magazines without permission. Some video download are also provided by this path.

A safer free source of video material is provided by Torrents. The major problem of-cause is that most content distributors consider all torrents as being illegal and so do everything they can to shut down the services providing them, but there is probably considerably more legal content on the torrent network than illegal, and it's use to share all types of large files far outweighs the downloading of the latest films. Personally I do not see anything illegal in having publicly broadcast television programs available as torrents. If I record the program off air, strip the adverts and store it on my media server here then I can watch it when I like. If I've missed an episode of a series I can download it from a catchup service - often for free - but I can't save that with the local library so downloading a copy from other viewers simply make sense to me. Once you have a clean safe distribution network like that from which material such as new films that have not yet been generally broadcast on TV, other public domain material can be managed properly rather than continually being shut down blocking all legitimate traffic as well. Currently the torrent network is riddled with suspect index sources simply because there is no properly managed clean index, so just like the card scammers swamping the search engines with fraudulent sites we have torrent indexes doing the same thing for torrent traffic.

So where do we find safe and legal sources of video media? The starting point for many will be youtube, and as with all our sources the quality can be somewhat variable if the video has actually been uploaded to youtube. We have mentioned television episodes and these are regularly uploaded to youtube, but without the producers permission, so they will often be taken down again. Some television companies do use youtube to provide trailers for their programs with links from their websites but it is often difficult to find the legitimate posts in a sea of unauthorised ones, and linking to any of them risks the post being taken down again later. More concerning however is the appearance of both 'pay per view' via youtube 'partners' and forwarding to sites outside youtube. As a good example a documentary we are trying to locate a copy of is Passion Dispair and a search on youtube will give a number of results appearing to show full length versions of the program, however every one will take you around the houses to third party sites who's only aim is to scam your card details! They have simply been using the IMDb database to create phantom posts on youtube.

Passion Despair is a useful test for other scams on google and bing since as far as we can establish apart from the showing in 2011 at a film festival, it has never been release! So anybody claiming to have a copy is suspicious. The first level of scam is more irritating that actually illegal since it directs you to other services such as Amazon or Netflix and suggests if you sign up for a free trial you will be able to watch it. A little bit of honesty would be nice, but then little of the advertising on google passes that test, and the intermediate sites who's results google display are just click through advertising rather than anything useful. However it also opens up the path to the second level sites which are also offering 'free access' but are the same third party sites that the youtube forwarding is now targeting. There are hundreds of these fake sites although many of them simply forward to a smaller number of 'registration services'.

If paid access is available to meterial that is not available in the public domain it would be nice if we could identify that path early in a search. In the case of Passion Despair the distributor actually has a shop web page but like many such operations it has not got around to actually populating the shop. That the documentary has never been released as a DVD is supported by the fact that there is no shop listing for it, and other than the 2011 Gdansk DocFilm Festival it has never been shown as far as we can tell. This makes the fraudulent sites a lot easier to spot, but when one has a piece of media that exists in several formats it may not be quite so easy to avoid a problem site. However quite a good rule is simply to avoid any links that do not take you to a viewable copy of the media. Don't bother following any links that direct you to another page.