Its fair to say that practically everyone who has access to your computer has either signed up to sites like Metacafe or YouTube or viewed videos from one of these sites, which is the reason why the internet video business is constantly growing daily, but how do we protect ourselves against movie piracy?

The fact is it is impossible to protect ourselves from video piracy, online videos that are hosted on sites are continuously being 'Downloaded' and 'Ripped' by the general public. I suspect that the music business is taking the largest hit and will always find a fall in earnings as the word gets around, music videos which are hosted on websites like YouTube can be ripped for free, sometimes for a small fee. This is contrary to the law as the artist or the artist's representative own the copyright and each time the movie is torn the copyright law is breeched, although Google is trying to combat video piracy by utilizing the YouTube Video Identification Software this only allows the copyright holder to 'claim their content' that this doesn't prevent people downloading and ripping the movie straight onto their computer.

For instance I found a site the other day which makes it possible for users to 'Rip Online Video's' for free, they do not even ask for registration so anybody can use it and we don't have any idea who is ripping your movie at this time. This website doesn't download the whole movie it extracts the audio from the video and saves it directly onto your computer, so if a artist released a brand new song and used YouTube to promote the single this could be on people's hard drive only hours after hearing it on the radio.