TV Links website owner Arrested

TV-Links.co.uk Raided, Owner Arrested: UPDATED
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TV-Links (now dead) is a site which links to sites like Google Video and YouTube, which host clips of TV shows. Today, the Gloucestershire County Council, in association with a group called the FACT, raided the site’s servers and arrested the 26 year old man from Cheltenham who ran the site.

FACT
A man is now in prison because he runs a site where other people can link to low-resolution tv shows, hosted by Google. FACT did not raid Google, they raided a site which merely links to TV shows.

Like this: The Office on Stage 6.

If I still lived in England, then could I be charged with the same crimes? As ZeroPaid’s Jared asks, could the people who link to my site be charged as co-conspirators?

This is what is known as Deep Linking (wikipedia article). There have been a few legal cases about this already in different parts of the world. The most memorable of these was a case in Texas less than a year ago which involved linking to motocross videos. Unfortunately, the court ruled against a website which linked to a larger company’s videos. (There are other cases at Netlitigation.)

This effectively makes the entire internet illegal.

I don’t know enough about copyright law in England, but clearly the justice system is broken. Google, which is actually hosting the copyrighted content, is untouchable. Don’t forget that Google’s YouTube service only became more popular than rival video sites because of it’s benefit-of-the-doubt copyright policy (which has only just recently been replaced by a content filtering system, now that it has become a high-profile target). They just have so much money that they have become above the law.
Instead, the EU’s version of the MAFIAA has backed a trade union, the Federation Against Copyright Theft, which did policework and created a case to arrest a man who led a community-based content sharing site. Copyright laws do not protect citizens, they prosecute them on behalf of rich copyright cartels.

There isn’t much info about this right now, only a single brief article from the Guardian, but it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens when more details emerge.

Linking is Not A Crime!
Free The 26 Year Old Man From Cheltenham!

R

Update!:

I received an email from somebody high up at TV-Links who wishes to remain anonymous.

Apparently, not only the owner has been arrested, but some of the moderating staff as well. One senior mod, who lives in Ireland and not the UK, was arrested and held for five hours. He had this to say on a forum:

“Well I may aswell post here now. I was an SMod on tv-l, ive been in a police station for the last 5 hours been questioned about my involvement in the site. Apparently they can charge me for involvement in organized crime!!! WTF!!!! The scary thing is that im not even in the UK, im in Ireland, which is governed by FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) the police operation was massive scale, I was on tv-l just as it went offline, no warning whatsoever. AFAIK Sin (site owner) is still been held. All I know for sure is that the sites gone (for now anyway)… and that we (mods) could, in theory (if it goes this far) be sued £100,000,000, which FACT are saying is what the industry lost as a direct result of the site. Needless to say, im a little concerned atm”

He doesn’t say he’s been charged, but it sounds like they’re doing some tough interrogation, threatening to charge him with organized crime and a hundred million pound lawsuit.

The source also told me that the TV-Links forum is still alive, but unavailable under the old DNS

He finally said the he doesn’t know how this will end, but if TV-Links does go down, it will go down kicking and screaming. Good luck to them! We might have to wait a little while for more information to come out before we can figure out a way to best support these guys from corporate bullying. I’m going to email the Open Rights Group, the British equivalent of the EFF, to get a statement and maybe try to organize some defense action.

One last thing: A commentor on reddit.com mentioned that TV-Links did not engage in Deep Linking, as I said before, but rather Hotlinking, embedding the Google (or apparently some Chinese alternative) hosted content in their own site. I don’t know how this affects things.

That’s all for now,
Rich

Update 2:
Got another email from a TVL staff member. They’ve started a petition to get some support for Sin, go on and give it a sign.

R

Update 3:
More emails from TV-Links mods. Apparently, the raided servers were hosted in the Netherlands, which means this is a multi national operation.

“I would love to get one thing (works around “fact” grrr) straight:
We or better Sin wasn’t that stupid to host the main site in the UK, it
was a co.uk domain but the servers were in the Netherlands.
All the articles I have read so far went had comments about how this
couldn’t have happened if the site would have been in sweden and what not.
But that’s were the internet law needs some clarification. What does
matter? The Domain? The country where the server is in? Where the site
owner lives?

So, maybe you could get a note out that only our forum (which for some
reason is still active) wasn’t taken down but the servers in the
Netherlands are gone. So, this has to be a bit larger than only the UK
police marching alone versus us.”

Also:

“In the guardian article, it says the we would our visitors download stuff.
That’s not really true. Sure, with the proper knowledge, you can
download everything that your browser displays.
BUT: We did everything we could to make it as hard as possible for the
users to actually download and save the file. No direct download links
or anything. No posts on the forums allowed to the pages on the hosts
where you CAN download them.
OK, the stage 6 player makes it fairly easy but even there we tried
maksed the actual ID from the video. (And even there where the player
has its own download folder and all… most people still couldn’t figure
that out)
So, I think we did a fairly good job to protect the files from
downloading. At least way better than the hosts themselves.”