The massively popular video streaming site TVLinks was last night shut down by British authorities and the owner, a 26 year old man from Cheltenham, England was arrested on copyright violation charges.
TVLinks started as a small niche site offering links to other sites on the Internet where you could watch television programmes and movies. As is always the case with a great idea, word soon got around until the site became too popular for its own good.
Facilitation Of Copyright Infringement
British authorities, lead by FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) then became interested and shut the site down citing the “facilitation” of copyright infringement.
The problem is does providing links to already available material actually constitute the facilitation of copyright theft? The pirated content was widely available on other sites so TVLinks just offered its users a way of reaching it without actually hosting anything illegal itself.
A spokesman for FACT said:
“Sites such as TVLinks contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organizing, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites.”
Middleman Sites
It’s a worrying development for fans of endeavours such as these middleman type sites which up until now have been seen as a get around to the copyright infringement laws.
The fact that the authorities have come down so hard on TVLinks is likely to scare off anyone else from attempting such a scheme.
Surely if FACT and its relevant organisations were serious about fighting copyright theft, they’d go after the big boys rather than a middleman who is only directing you on somewhere?
