Archive for October 24th, 2007
No please, not the TV!
The other day (Friday to be exact) I went to check out one of my favorite sites for keeping up to date on TV shows (since I don’t have cable) and movies,TV-Links.Co.Uk. To my dismay, I found only 404 errors. I was hoping in the bottom of my heart that it was just having technical difficulties. Well, it wasn’t so.
TV-Links was a site which linked to videos hosted around the internet (on sites such a YouTube and Stage6), almost all of which were copyrighted TV shows. This worked great for many people, they could watch all the TV for free. It also allowed those who were denied access (due to the area they lived in) to watch shows which are legally broadcast on the TV station’s websites to see it in an alternate form. However, they did not host any of the videos themselves, just linked to other sites and people who were hosting them.
On Thursday the owner of the site was taken into custody by Gloucestershire police under section 92 of the Trade Mark Act. The humorous part about this is that the site didn’t violate copyright laws. They were not hosting the files, nor did they upload them in anyway. They simply supplied a link to where they were located. Were authorities looking to point fingers it would be the users who uploaded them. The only thing they can legally do is subpoena the site’s owner to find out where the links came from, which would result in a long chain of ‘he said, she said’. Complete foolishness if you ask me.
More on this:
TV-Links man was arrested under trademark laws @ The Register
