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TV-Links.co.uk Shut Down

By Robert | October 26, 2007

The British authorities raided their first ever UK based piracy site last week. We are talking about TV-Links.co.uk, one web site that proved to be very popular among individuals that wanted to see new and old movies via the Internet. The British Authorities also arrested the 26 year old webmaster and some members of the moderation staff. It seems that this was a mixed operation that saw local police and FACT collaborate in order to bring the web site down and arrest the people behind it.

TV-links.co.uk did not host any material that was copyrighted content. This web site provided just links to various TV shows you can find on other video-sharing web sites including Google Video and YouTube. Various individuals from around the world have protested to the closure of TV-Links.co.uk because of the fact that the sites that are linked to did nothing to remove the content and the UK based web site is not at fault here.

FACT stated that sites of the same type as TV-links.co.uk are contributing and they profit from copyright infringement because they organize, identify, post and index links that lead to infringing content available on the Internet while they guide visitors to illegal web sites. It also seems that this web site is only the first point in a larger campaign against web piracy.

Although this does seem legal, we need to start wondering why this web site was brought down and YouTube is not at all affected by this or other websites that do host copyrighted material like DailyMotion for instance. Google was not raided but the web site that linked to Google was. This does not seem fair but then again we can not bring the entire YouTube website down because the copyrighted material is posted by various users. They are also not targeted at all. It will be interesting to see the evolution of the proceedings in this case. It would have been a more effective move to first highlight all the links and use TV-Links.co.uk in order to get to the source of the copyrighted content, not bringing the web site down.

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