"It's not hard for law enforcement to find these sites. "Sites like that are shut down constantly," says Rayburn, the CEO of. Just earlier this year, the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization took down, an illegal site streaming UFC fights live online, and seized its records. They give you the most access to infringing content," Gibson said. "If you have to choose your battles, you're more likely to go after the bottlenecks. But they're not usually as big as the primary sites, which aggregate unlicensed content. These secondary sites, however, where the content actually exists, do violate copyright law. So we don’t say that GM is on the hook just because it provides a technology that can be used illegally," Gibson said. You can use it as a getaway car in a bank robbery, or you can use it to get work. " It does very much depend on the marketing and the uses are encouraging. In that case, determining accountability requires the "inducement rule," a test created in a 2005 Supreme Court ruling which states that a company or website can only be held accountable for distributing unlicensed content if it clearly encourage users to infringe a copyright.
Online streaming sites may try to avoid trouble by not hosting their own content, instead acting as a search engine for links to streamed content, usually embedded from a secondary site.