Move over YouTube—the folks behind The Pirate Bay are working on their own video streaming site with no restrictions. The site will be called The Video Bay and it is now on the Web as a "Beta Extreme," though currently there is no functionality as everything is still under development. There is no indication of when it will be ready for public consumption, either, though when it goes live, it will supposedly host videos without any kind of censorship or copyright restrictions.

The Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde spoke via videoconference to the Open Video Conference in New York this week, discussing the details behind The Video Bay. He noted that the site would use a number of HTML 5 features, including tags using the ogg/theora video and audio formats. There are demos for both of these tags on The Video Bay already (one for video and one for audio).

There is a warning on the site, however, saying that it will be an "experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly." Indeed, searching for any type of video yields zero results and a launch date is set for sometime in the general future. "It will be done when it’s done, in the future, in like a year or five," Sunde told the Open Video Conference attendees.

Whether The Video Bay will actually compete against the likes of YouTube, however, depends entirely on whether it can build a big enough audience upon launch. There are many (many, many) other streaming video sites on the Internet that are already competing for the same eyeballs—we can just imagine how much more saturated the space will be in one to five years. Then again, The Pirate Bay does currently have strong following, so it has the potential to be more successful out of the gate than other YouTube clones.

At the same time, those behind The Pirate Bay are already in a heap of legal trouble in Sweden thanks to their apparently copyright-hatin' ways. They were recently handed a guilty verdict with jail time from a Swedish district court for assisting copyright infringement, even though The Pirate Bay hosted none of the files in question. The defendants were denied a retrial less than a week ago, too, after having complained that the judge presiding over the case is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an advocacy group that pushes stricter copyright laws.

Sunde claims that The Pirate Bay will continue to fight the decisions, but a completely restriction-free video site isn't likely to help the situation. Regardless, it seems as if Sunde and gang are marching forward with The Video Bay (slowly and drunkenly, that is), so we look forward to seeing the finished result—if it ever gets there.