German Twitter clone aids TV show piracy
Frazr, a German-language clone of online messaging service Twitter, has not been growing fast enough to suit its founders.
Its solution: Partner with a company named Onlinetvrecorder, that plays in the legal gray-zone by allowing people to make free recordings of broadcasts from German TV stations, P2P Blog reports.
It works like this: OTR users can get updates about their favorite TV shows via Frazr. If they sign up for Frazr and send a couple messages, they’ll get easier access to OTR downloads.
Many German TV stations have already gotten injunctions against OTR, P2P Blog says, which explains why the company has moved its corporate headquarters to Vanuatu.
Germany is already gaining an international reputation for ripping off successful web sites, with Frazr in the lead. We have to wonder if this will expose the Samwer Bros. — an investor in Frazr (our coverage) — to copyright lawsuits.
Hey Frazr, was machst Du?
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.