The Pirate Bay team, which is battling a one-year jail sentence for copyright violation, launched a beta version of a YouTube-like video-sharing site.

The site, VideoBay, is in "beta extreme," and comes with the warning, "Don't expect anything to work at all" displayed prominently on the front page.

A quick look at the available content included a variety of music videos and clips from TV shows. It's unclear how the site will handle take-down requests form copyright holders.

The Pirate Bay administrators first announced plans for the video-streaming site more than two years ago. Peter Sunde, spokesman for the group, said there is no definite timetable for the development of VideoBay. "It will be done when it's done, in the future, in like a year or five," he told the blog TorrentFreak.

A Swedish judge found Sunde and the three other Pirate Bay defendants guilty of copyright violation in April and sentenced them to a year in jail. In addition, the judge ordered Sunde, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom to pay $3.6 million to several entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros., EMI and Columbia Pictures.

The defendants claimed they weren't guilty of copyright infringement because they didn't host any of the content, but only provided the means for people to share files between themselves.

The defendants appealed the conviction, claiming Judge Tomas Norstrom was biased, based on his relationship with copyright-protection groups. An appellate court rejected that argument this month, and the defendants are reportedly appealing the verdict on other grounds.

The Pirate Bay operators this month launched a virtual private network service to provide a more anonymous way for people to share files online. The IPredator Global Anonymity Service costs about $7 a month. According to Pirate Bay, 180,000 people signed up for the service, which is taking on subscribers gradually.

Pirate Bay has about 20 million users worldwide.

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