The great class struggle video library project

It has to be one of the best-kept secrets in class struggle anarchism (and we aren't exactly high-profile to start with). Christiebooks, named for one of Britain's few anarcho-celebs Stuart Christie, has been hosting probably the largest single online collection of class-struggle related film in the UK, possibly in the English speaking world (if there's a bigger one let me know) via their host, Brightcove.

However this is all set to change from December 17th, as Brightcove move over to a new system and the company has taken the opportunity to lumber Christiebooks with a punitive £26,000 bill for the privilege. With barely £30 quid given in donations since their launch last year, they're either going to have to find an alternative, or dump the project.

This could all sound a bit depressing, except that I think there's plenty of scope, hypothetically speaking, for a major video project like this to exist for free - while actively improving its ability to handle higher-volume traffic. The solution could be two-fold:

The Nabolister effect
Nabolister.com is awesome. You can get practically anything which has ever been released on DVD in the last few years, and frequently, handheld pirates of major motion pictures just days after they arrive on the big screen. Yet they host practically nothing. They do this through a dispersed hosting pattern, where content is uploaded to other providers - google video for example - and then linked to from the main site. While this sometimes necessitates a bit of tabbing for the user, it eliminates the need for tiny groups to use up huge amounts of bandwidth on their own sites - and linking is not illegal.

Setting up accounts on these sites is free, easy and has quick upload times. It gives you flexibility to embed back to your own site, and get them out to a wider audience via the companies who's bandwidth you're using. This can work for both original content, and copyrighted work.

However, with copyright stuff, depending on the hosting company, content can be pulled down if it's something which the creators don't want going up for free. So it's by no means a perfect system, and does require picking video streaming groups which are a) immune to prosecution or b) are difficult to contact to demand a takedown. It also requires a reasonable monitoring system, so if a video does go down, you get quick notification and can reload it.

Torrents
Okay this is pretty well-known, but just for the sake of the exercise, this can be the other option, particularly with videos which are risking takedown. Using a reasonable tracker (lets say thepiratebay for example, as they're the high-profile ones who keep publicly humiliating Disney and the like), and with a few people signed up who are online a lot and have good bandwidth to seed it, this can be a good secondary system to streamed video, providing a full download service regardless of whether or not it's been taken down. It's embarrassingly easy to set torrents up and again, by putting them on a browseable tracker, you open up the content to a wider audience.

All this could be done (with a certain amount of patience and possibly a bit of help from volunteers - the Christiebooks library is a big chunk o' space) for free.

Now obviously piracy is a terrible thing, has destroyed the film industry, all these execs in disintegrating shoes and threadbare suits etc, and I would never advocate doing such an odious thing on a public blog. But y'know, just saying, hypothetically like, you could do that.