Their website doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Grindingly slow, almost contentless, no clues at all as to what they are proposing to actually do to shut down the sites, which is the hard part. No implication of automatic shutdown, they just say they will notify people. So all they are selling is a search engine really. They are just offering to search the web for files which you claim you own. There is some handwaving about timestamps and digital signatures - their very tedious Flash presentation implies that they copy, sign and timestamp the allegedly offending website and make two CDs of it, sending one to the ISP and one to their customer. Also screenshots. Dumb. No hint as to what to do if the "infringer" sues you for copying their website onto a CD. No hint as to what they do if two of their customers claim to own the same content. No hint as to what they do if I claim that I own some files just to sick them onto Disney or Murdoch. (Not that it is hard to guess - as always with these things, he who dies employing the most lawyers wins). Ken Brown Yeoh Yiu wrote:
as seen in Red Herring, who observe that the 'automatic shutdown' of sites it doesn't like could be problematic, to say the least:
BAYTSP, $3M San Jose, CA http://www.baytsp.com THE PITCH: "BayTSP is emerging with the leading technology solution to online piracy of digital media. The company has developed and deployed a sophisticated spidering and detection service that identifies infringing files by their digital 'DNA,' and proceeds to automatically investigate and shut down the offending sites. Customers in the pipeline include Viacom, the NFL, and major record labels. With a slim team, low burn, and virtually no marketing expense, BayTSP has already attracted attention and interest from the major record labels and music publisher organizations in their fight against Napster and other peer-to-peer file sharing networks." WHY WE LIKE IT: Interest from major customers. WHAT THEY'RE UP AGAINST: Automatic detection and shutdown of infringement could lead to disaster if there's a mistake made. CONTACT: investor@baytsp.com