Making online video streaming a criminal offence may lead to confusion because the technology has not been properly defined, experts warn.
The government proposed this week that using streaming technology to initiate the unauthorised distribution of copyrighted content be made illegal.
Popular video-hosting websites such as YouTube are widely seen as examples of streaming technology, which broadly means the transfer of multimedia data as a steady and continuous stream, allowing users to view or listen to a work online.
But information technologists said there were grey areas in its definition and that the proposal, which targeted data-transferring technology, might cause further controversy. 'Streaming technology has evolved over time and many people do not really understand the rationale behind it,' Jack Lee Yiu-bun, an associate professor of information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said.
YouTube and many video-hosting sites were in fact not transferring data by streaming, he said, with such technology mostly applied to webcasting software such as PPLive.
Such peer-to-peer software allows users to select channels as if watching television. But the content is not directly received from one source, but from hundreds of internet users, he said.
