The TV-Links website has been shut down and it’s 26-year-old operator arrested after a raid by Gloucestershire Police in cooperation with an anti-piracy group called Fact (Federation Against Copyright Theft).
What’s disturbing about this is TV-Links didn’t host any of the movies or shows themselves. All they did was link to videos on YouTube, Google Video, Stage6, and a whole bunch of Asian and Eastern European servers - none of which were owned or controlled by them. Arresting someone for linking to something shows a complete lack of understanding for how the Internet works. By their logic I should be arrested for linking to TV-Links and other sites like it.
The chances of a successful prosecution are negligible but this guy will probably be bankrupted in the process and that’s probably what they want to do to make an example of him. If they really wanted to crack down on web piracy they would go after the sites hosting the videos, but they aren’t such easy targets.
The arrest and the closure of the site - www.tv-links.co.uk - came during an operation by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police.
“Sites such as TV Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organising, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites,” said a spokesman for Fact.
The group’s director general Kieron Sharp said TV Links was the first major target in a campaign to crackdown on web piracy. (source)
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