The jury trial of Jonathan Dixon, who is accused of stealing the footage, began this morning in the Invercargill District Court.
Dixon has been on bail since 2011 after allegedly dishonestly obtaining the CCTV of the incident, which happened in the Base bar in Queenstown in September 2011, during the Rugby World Cup.
He faces a charge of dishonestly accessing a computer on September 13, 2011.
Former England captain Tindall, now a player-coach at Gloucester, is married to the Queen's granddaughter Zara Phillips.
In her opening, Crown solicitor Mary-Jane Thomas said Dixon had no right to take the footage for the purpose of making money from it.
"The Crown says this was an opportunity made in heaven if you wanted to sell something and make some money and this is what the Crown says was the accused's intention from the very beginning."
She said he asked a junior staff member at the bar to download the footage for him, and while he waited searched the internet for how to make money from selling a story to tabloid newspapers, and contacted a newspaper.
For various reasons, however, he was unable to sell the footage, and three days later put it on Youtube accompanied with a lecture to Mr Tindall.
Because he had failed to sell it, he sought instead notoriety, which, clearly, from the dialogue that accompanied the Youtube posting, he "quite liked", Ms Thomas said
The Crown's case was that the footage was not his to take and that he knew he had no right to take it, she said.
In a brief opening Dixon's lawyer, John Westgate, of Dunedin, said Dixon's defence would be that he honestly believed, as a person who worked at the bar, he had a right to access the footage.
Blair Impey, the general manager of Base bar, said he became aware two days after the incident that Dixon had the footage.
He told Ms Thomas that Dixon knew he needed his permission to use the footage and wanted to make a deal about going to a newspaper Dixon had already approached, but he did not want to that to happen because of the damage it would do to the bar's reputation.
He staff were allowed to access the footage, but not security guards, who were only able to access the footage for security or liqour licensing reasons.
Under cross-examination from Mr Westgate he agreed that staff at the bar regularly downloaded incidents from security footage from the bar to a file on a computer at the bar, for the staff's own entertainment, "but we didn't post it anywhere public".
He repeated that security guards or contractors were not allowed to access the footage other than for the outline purposed, but conceded to Mr Westgate that there were no written policies or training to that end and he knew Dixon regularly used the business's computer to email.
He also denied that meeting with Dixon several times after he knew Dixon had the footage was part of his own agenda to make money off the footage.
He said his plan was to make Dixon believe he was interested in making a deal with him so Dixon would give him the information he needed to stop the footage being sold to UK tabloids, which was what happened in the, after which Dixon posted the footage on the internet.
He later said to Ms Thomas on reexamination, that he had never felt it necessary to tell any person in the building, staff or contractor, they were not to go into the CCTV and copy it or sell it.
"No, it doesn't need to be said, to me it's an implicit trust thing."
The trial continues tomorrow.
