Gestapo Tactics Shut Down Major Website!
Posted by papundits on 10/28/2007
Major “Pirate” Website Shut Down
[I'm pissed! Only a small portion of this site was illegal! So why shut the whole thing down????
I enjoyed watching the legal cartoons and videos, home-made ones too, from this site. There were many old, out of copyright cartoons that we enjoyed watching.
This is typical of the heavy-handed Movie & Music Industry.
They'll hit you with a sledge hammer for minor infractions.
Now to clarify: I do not condone, or support, Pirating of movies, music, written material, etc.
But these Gestapo types ALWAYS throw the Baby out with the Bath Water.]
Friday October 19, 2007
amended on Friday October 26 2007.
Guardian Unlimited
by Katie Allen
This article was amended on Friday October 26 2007. A caption accompanying the picture originally attached to the above article said that the website TV links was closed for allowing users to download illegal material. In fact the site provided links to illegal material hosted by other websites, as the name suggests. The caption has been removed.
One of the world’s most-used film websites has been closed after providing links to illegal versions of major Hollywood hits and TV shows.
The first closure of a major UK-based web site was also accompanied by raids and an arrest, the anti-piracy group Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) said today.
A 26-year-old man from Cheltenham was arrested on Thursday in connection with offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet, Fact said.
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.
Fact claims that tv-links.co.uk was providing links to illegal film content that had been camcorder recorded from cinemas and then uploaded to the internet. The site also provided links to TV shows that were being illegally distributed...
[So what about the rest of the site??? Only what was ILLEGAL SHOULD HAVE BEEN REMOVED!!!! This really inconveniences the rest of the world just to prove FACT & their ILK are bad (and above the law?) and can do whatever they want.]
“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…
[I understand that many of the Illegal Links were to Google. So why not TRY to shut Google down, eh FACT? Afraid?]
Also Posting:
P2PNet
The New Freedom
UK’s www.tv-links.co.uk busted
p2pnet news | Movies:- “Welcome to TV Links, for your viewing pleasure we have compiled various links from the latest to some long forgotten TV shows, classics, films, documentaries and much more,” said www.tv-links.co.uk. “How much does this cost you? Nothing, its all Free of charge! Please sit back, relax and enjoy the show.”
“Said” in the past tense because the site has been taken down and a 26-year-old Briton arrested, “in connection with offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet,” says Guardian Unlimited.
Behind the bust was entertainment cartel pseudo cop organisation the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), also known as Farcical Approaches to Copyright Transgressions.
The arrest and shutdown involved staff from the Gloucestershire County Council’s trading standards, FACT “investigators” and Gloucestershire Police, says the story, failing to mention UK taxpayers funded the corporate copyright operation.
But the cooperation shouldn’t come as a surprise. As p2pnet noted last year, in Britain the entertainment and software cartels have in effect been given full police powers…
TV-Links.co.uk Raided, Owner Arrested: UPDATED
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.
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.
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…
Linking * is Not A Crime!
Free The 26 Year Old Man From Cheltenham!
* Deep Linking and the HTTP Protocol
The technology behind the World Wide Web does not actually make any distinction between “deep” links and any other links—all links are functionally equal. This is intentional; one of the designed purposes of the Web is to allow authors to link to any published document on another site. The possibility of so-called “deep” linking is therefore built into the Web technology of HTTP and URLs by default… According to the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group, “any attempt to forbid the practice of deep linking is based on a misunderstanding of the technology, and threatens to undermine the functioning of the Web as a whole”. [1]
Tags: Deep Linking, entertainment cartels, Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), Gestapo, Google, Gloucestershire Police, Guardian Unlimited, Movie & Music Industry, Pirating, software cartels, UK taxpayers, Website, YouTube.
