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TVLinks Gets Taken Down, Linking Becomes Illegal

Posted by Paul B | October 23, 2007 .

Saturday the 20th of October 2007, that is a date you should put in your diary with a little note, “the day a large part of the internet died”. In a move that has to be the first of its type anywhere in the world, UK authorities took down the website tv-links.co.uk and arrested the owner. What crime had been committed here you may ask, that of linking! The tv-links.co.uk website did nothing more than provide links to content hosted elsewhere and openly linked to by hundreds of other websites from all over the world. Some of this content may have been dubious in terms of copyright but once again I’ll emphasise that they only linked to content hosted on other websites (Google owned YouTube as one example no less). The actual offence relates to “the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet”, the keyword here being facilitation. By linking to a website that contains illegal content he was apparently facilitating copyright infringement, sorry but what a complete load of bullsh*t. The people facilitating the copyright infringement are the website owners who allow the illegal content to be served from their servers, in this case one example being Google. What he was actually guilty of was finding and cataloguing content. Isn’t it funny how the UK authorities including F.A.C.T. (Federation against copyright theft) decided not to even try and have the actual CONTENT taken down, why, because they’d be taking on somebody their own size rather than some poor 26 year old lad running a hobby website.

I wonder what they possibly think they have gained by taking tv-links.co.uk out of the equation, within a month another dozen copycat sites hosted away from the UK will have popped up all just as accessible to UK consumers as TV Links ever was. The actual content is still available online and can be easily found by doing nothing more than a Google search. The only thing they have succeeded in doing is removing the liberties of UK citizens to discuss and share online. They didn’t even ask him to remove the content (probably as it wasn’t his content that was the problem) but instead decided to raid his house. It’s a joke. But is it really that serious? Well it is if you have ever embedded a YouTube clip on your blog that you don’t have expressed permission to use, or if you use MySpace/Bebo/FaceBook to share Music and Movie preferences or if you operate a website that has outbound links (that’ll be all of them then) . As we are now responsible for the content on the websites we link to does it mean that I have to spend each and every day making sure that every website I link to is not doing anything illegal? What about the sites they link to, or the sites after that, what about what they link to? It’s crap, nonsense and not just a little bit offensive. Linking is what makes the World Wide Web work, without it the greatest information resource ever invented becomes nothing more than a glorified billboard. How much worse do things have to get, I remember when the worst thing an outbound link could do was break and lower the quality of your website, now it appears as though it can see you on the wrong end of a police raid! I only hope the bloke involved sees this through ok, with any luck they’re just scaring him and don’t have a leg to stand on or at least that’s what common sense would say. Then again with the nanny state the UK has become that can see community officers stand by and watch a child drown in the name of health and safety common sense doesn’t have a place.

On a personal level I’m annoyed as well, not least because I spent a lot of money on the onlinetv.im domain which I wanted as a resource to live streaming online tv. I wanted a blog format for things I found interesting online (like ITV’s Tycoon series for example) but I’m abandoning it. As somebody who makes their entire living online it’s very important I do a risk assessment before starting anything new, with the news in the UK it’s just not worth it. On the other hand if you live outside the UK and want to do something similar then just let me know via the contact form, I’m now prepared to sell the onlinetv.im domain name.

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5 Comments so far
  1. jackbravo UNITED STATES Windows 2000 Internet Explorer 6.0  October 23, 2007 10:44 pm

    Man, what a load of balony. Don’t these people have anything else better to do with their time? Why don’t they try going after terrorists or something…sheesh!

  2. tvlinks UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.7  October 25, 2007 10:34 am

    so linkling links are illegal what about linking links to those websites like http://www.boxsweeper.com this website has all the pirate video clips from 10 or maybe 30 other websites…its like a one stop for all the pirate sites! you could even download too! dont even need a software like bitorrent!

  3. Scott UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Internet Explorer 7.0  October 25, 2007 11:12 pm

    This sucks. yet again the legal system finding some way to screw us over. Memories of Liksang coming flooding back….

    Soon we wont even be able to go to the toilet without stepping over some line.

    Screw you hippy comes to mind!

    Watch this space.. A flood of TV links remakes will now pop thier heads out. The same scenario as some torrent sites. When one gets closed 10 start up….

  4. Martin MEXICO Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8  October 26, 2007 10:26 pm

    Arghh thats really annoying, what you have said here is totally true, i really believe they are trying to scare him coz the way I see it then, as you mentioned as well, they should close down google for any UK. user because it would give an intrinsic facility to find non-copyrighted content online, its a real shame that i don’t see much movement in my country to build sites like tv-links, since as far as i know ( and my brother is a lawyer ) we don’t have clearly legislated anything against such act as what tv-links used to make, and well i don’t know in UK but here ( i am mexican ) we have a constitutional law that says that you can’t judge an old crime with new laws, so the way i see it if i built a site today, they couldnt judge me with a law that is coming tomorrow, maybe they could “push me” somehow, by telling me I might break this law sooner or later somehow and then they would catch me, but not ever just TAKE ME AWAY as they did, i don’t know how recent is this law in UK compared to the time when the site was first uploaded, but if something similar to this doesn’t exist in UK.. man then you guys really have guts when bulding websites.

    I hope soon some other site gains enough popularity coz so far i have forced myself TO USE GOOGLE to find other similar sites that have different series coz none so far has a library of links as extense as the one that tv links used to have

  5. A-P FINLAND Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8  October 27, 2007 12:08 pm

    Authorities, go f**k yourselves. Or at least do something MORE sensible than this.