OnlinePhim.net Blog

You know you reach some kind of milestone in popularity when you get one of these. We’re not that big and we don’t have that many fans (or fanatics, like certain sites), so it was quite a surprise when we got one of these letters in the mail. We do get them once in awhile from fan groups, fanatics, and others - shall we say … “enthusiastic” individuals - but this is the first from a producer.

From: 9301, TVBLEGAL <tvblegal@tvb.com.hk>
Date: 2008/8/28
Subject: Copyright Infringement

Dear Sirs,
 
Re: Copyright Infringement
 
We are a well known television broadcast company in Hong Kong and the copyright owner of various television programmes produced by us.
 
It has recently come to our notice that one of you have been using your website http://www.onlinephim.net (”Website”) to provide streaming of our television programmes for public’s viewing without our authorization.
 
Details of your uploaded files which contain our copyrighted works can be found on the Website by accessing the following links:-
 
1.          Our copyrighted work name in English and Chinese: 
Unnatural Born Killer (十三密殺令)
Links of files containing infringed materials:-
http://www.onlinephim.net/1548.vid
 
2.          Our copyrighted work name in English and Chinese: 
A Change of Destiny (天機算)
Links of files containing infringed materials:-
http://www.onlinephim.net/624.vid
http://www.onlinephim.net/696.vid

and the list goes on for quite a bit. It was too long that it got cut off in the mail when we got it. They had to email it twice. Appearently, someone had spent some time going through our listings. Do they have interns in HK? Anyway, about 15 minutes later, we received another email. It simply states:

From: 9301, TVBLEGAL <tvblegal@tvb.com.hk>
Date: 2008/8/28
Subject: Recall: Copyright Infringement

9301, TVBLEGAL would like to recall the message, “Copyright Infringement”.

Umm. OK. You had us worried for a few minutes there. We have more than a handful of reasons why their claim is without merit. We have no idea which one they used, we’re just glad that someone checked again. They should have double-checked before they send out the letter in the first place, but we have to give them credit for a quick recall. An apology would be nice, but we doubt that they’re that nice. Well, it’s a good thing that we didn’t have to go through all the legal paperworks because it was a little pass 3am and our lawyer was happily chasing sheeps and counting butterflies.

… so we shall resist no more. Thanks to spammers and wannabe hackers, our viewers has lost the use of the shoutbox (and voting right). Unfortunately, since I’m pretty busy most of my days, I don’t have time to work on a decent user management system and enable those features again.

Many viewers had suggested that we create a myspace or facebook account so that they have a way to keep in touch with us. Personally we don’t like those site, not because we’re antisocial but because they are so littered with so many ads that it’s hard to find your way around.  It’s such a big mess that you can bare know which parts are  actual contents and which are just ads.

However since most of you have either account already, or both, we decided to give it a try. So, for those that are interested … the myspace account we are trying out is located at http://www.myspace.com/onlinephim_net . Feel free to add us or leave a message. Let’s see how this turn out. For those of you who prefer facebook instead … well, let us know … maybe we’ll test that one out too.

Stage6, one of the most popular, high quality, sharing sites had permanently shut down its services as of 2/28/2008. The reason behind it? Well, there were lots of reasons. But the main reason is being … too much egos flew around to fit them all in a single site. Hey, you can’t keep a project moving forward when your key players stood up and leave, can you? With the close down of Stage6, their userbase of about 17.4 million visitors/month went up in smoke as well.

To prove that stupidity is still alive and well with the board of execs, they are now forwarding visitors to Veoh. They probably made some money for the deal, but still … what the heck? If Google shuts down, I doubt that they will forward their users to Microsoft. People liked Stage6 because they don’t have (much) restrictions, and now you forwarding them to a site that use 5min previews as standard and application that constantly crashes users’ computer? (To be fair, the divx plugin also crashes user computer, too … but you can download the videos without the need of an external app like Veoh’s). With the shutdown of stage6, the 700+ (current known count) video sharing sites can now start fighting over that piece of the pie. On a related note … crunchyroll, another popular everything-asian site, just raised $4million in a round of financing led by Venrock Associates. It’s not quite attractive as the buyout of Youtube (for $1.6billion by Google), but hey … its piece of the pie is getting bigger.