Modeblue

This week, the site www.tv-links.co.uk was shutdown and a 26 year old man from Cheltenham was arrested for offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement. The site, which provided links to stream television and film files but did not host any of the copyright material, has been shutdown due to “providing links to illegal film content that has been camcorded from within a cinema and then uploaded to the Internet” according to FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft).

Guardian Article

Kieron Sharp, FACT director general, commented: “We at FACT have stated very clearly that we intended to pursue those who are openly exploiting and facilitating the distribution of illegal film and TV content and this was the first major target.”

Roger Marles, head of trading standards, said: “This practice allows people to view any one of a large number of films and television programmes directly via the website. This is illegal under UK copyright law… No physical product changes hands but the effect is the same – anyone has the opportunity to view an illegal copy of a copyrighted work.”

This was a content disclaimer on the site:

My understanding was that it was illegal to own, provide or host illegal matierial, but as a content aggregator you were not responsible for the content provided by others. Also, let’s not forget, these were servers hosted in the Netherlands, not England. If they have the ability to shut down sites hosted abroad which link to copyright material I would point them at every search engine going, and all video hosting services – not least Youtube (where some of the tv-links content was hosted!).

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For example…

search for MP3s on the internet (some of the links on this site may infringe copyrights.)

Did I just break the law because I linked to a site that links to sites that may contain copyrighted material?

What if someone links to this page? Can they be arrested for linking to a page that links to a page that links to sites that may contain copyrighted material?

What if someone links to that page? Can they be arrested for linking to a page that links to a page that links to…
…and so on

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Shouldn’t the host of the illegal material be the ones who are breaking the law? & if so, don’t sites like TV-Links do a great job of finding those hosts? Instead of ripping down the sites that show just how much copyright theft there is going on, why not use them to stop the criminals from breaking the law, and by doing so putting these sites out of business.
Perhaps when the film & tv bosses cotton on to the inevitable increase of demand for free/cheap video services like 4oD, itv.com and BBC’s iPlayer we will see a reduction in the demand for poor quality illegal downloads.