TV-Links Is The Latest Victim In The Never-Ending Whack-A-Mole Game [Updated]
The popular television search engine tv-links.co.uk has been taken offline after a raid by British police who arrested the owner and operator of the site. The Guardian reports that the site has been shut down and that more raids on similar sites will follow.
However, what’s interesting about tv-links is that the site did not host any infringing content. As its url implies, tv-links merely linking to (sometimes) infringing content.
Is the act of linking to infringing content itself a violation of copyright? The rather intimidatingly named Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) seems to think so, but in the end it’ll be up to the British courts to decide.
What sticks out about Fact’s move is that they picked on a little guy, without the legal muscle to defend himself. The same charges could well be leveled against Google, which, like tv-links, allows you to search for files, many of which will not be legal, but Google will still provide a link to them. So why not go after Google?
If Fact’s goal is really to stop the flow of copyrighted video content, yesterday’s raid did absolutely nothing. Not only is the bulk of tv-links content still available directly through a combination of the Internet Archive and some proxies, it didn’t host any of the video so hundreds of other sites pointing to the same content march on.
And many of those sites, and the sites actually hosting the videos (like tudou.com, which is Japanese I believe), are outside British jurisdiction.
Savvy downloaders are already sharing links and sites that lead back to very same videos tv-links pointed to — in the Guardian’s comments section even, which is far larger audience than tv-links ever enjoyed. [Update: it would seem that the comments I saw were on another site, not the Guardian, at the moment I can’t seem to find that site in my browser history, sorry for the confusion and be sure to see the update info below.]
All of which lead us to ask the question: has anyone at Fact ever actually played whack-a-mole? Sure, in the beginning you can get them all, but eventually no one, not Fact, the RIAA, the MPAA or all of them together are going to stop the flow of copyright content on the net.
[Update: This story is apparently larger than The Guardian first reported. According to The New Freedom, tv-links staff members in Ireland have been arrested and threatened with charges of “organized crime,” and, given that tv-links’ servers were apparently in the Netherlands, clearly Fact has drummed up some international police cooperation. I contacted FACT looking for a comment, but given the time difference that may not happen until tomorrow.]
[photo credit]
