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Legal system gone mad


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Just saw this this morning and thought it might be of interest given a certain thread on these very forums :)

 

http://www.thenewfreedom.net/wp/2007/10/19/tv-linkscouk-raided-owner-arrested/

 

Completely mad if you ask me.

 

Edit: the completely mad statement is more to do with the fact that this is links we're speaking about regardless of where they lead to. Surely it should be the sites which are hosting the material that they should be going after?

 

I'm not getting involved in anything to do with the wider discussion of copyright infringement in general after all I guess I linked to a copyrighted article on another website - oohh that jogs the memory a bit about something else that happened many moons ago ;)

 

Edit no.2 - http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2195407,00.html (the guardian article regarding it - damn more linking to copyrighted material)

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Ah poo poo. tv-links.co.uk was a good website. :cry:

 

Maybe need to try one of the legitimate telly services again. A choice of 4OD (which was crap), BBC's iPlayer (Refuses to work on all but XP and even then it doesn't work half the time) or Joost (the best of the bunch so far).

 

What's the world coming to when you can get locked up for linking to a website. I hope they put the court notes online. Then the whole judicial system would need locked up as well for linking to the site that linked to the telly programmes!

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This is the Shetland Times Vs Shetland News extraveganza of yesteryear again - yet a little bit further.

 

Have I got this right? They have a man in custody because he has created a site "linking" to material?

 

The point there is "linking" .... hot tattie! IF they manage to secure a legal precedent on this case the entire lanscape of the Internet will alter ..!

 

I would imagine/hope that his guy will be released.

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This is the Shetland Times Vs Shetland News extraveganza of yesteryear again - yet a little bit further.

 

Yup, thats what it reminded me of. In a sense it was unfortunate that particular case was settled out of court (iirc) as it could of have some interesting ramifications for the web in general (remember this was over 10years ago). Admittedly Shetland News used the ST headlines to link to the ST site (again iirc) which was a bit cheeky and I think that was the crux of the copyright infringement argument. Of course it didn't help that certain individuals at both companies didn't exactly see eye to eye with each another either :)

 

There have been a fair few other cases in the past regarding linking to copyrighted material but I think the most of them have been thrown out or found in the defendants favour.

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^^ Indeed. This reminds me too of the The Pirate Bay fiasco last year where the Americans basically pressurised Swedish law to conform to their own ideals essentially bankrupting the guys involved through legal fees "just 'cos they could"! A shot in the air to anyone else attempting the same.

 

Let's all buy one of these "to be decommissioned" oilrigs ... anchor it in international waters and tie a leg of the Føroya Tele cable into it ;) arf arf

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Is it anything to do with linking to sites which hosts 'illegal' material?

 

If there was a british site which had links to pedophile sites hosted in a country that didn't do anything about it, I wouldn't be worried about the british link site being shutdown.

 

Is there such a piece of legislation to prevent my example? If so, it won't be hard to turn it around to stop the tvlinks example. I'm not impressed as copyright infringment is nothing in comparison to pedophilia but they are both illegal...

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I imagine that'll be the sort of crime he's being charged for - something to do with copyright infringement. But we're still just talking about links. He himself isn't breaking copyright (as far as I can tell) - the people hosting the material are. YouTube is a prime example - there is plenty of copyrighted material available on the site but nothing seems to be happening to Google over it.

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^^ Thats the absolute distinction - it's a "link" to another server/page/file for the most part in completely other continents.

 

He at no time was in actual possession of "illegal copyright infringed" material, merely linking to it and acting as a conduit to it. That is the scary thing here .. if it can be proven in a UK court he has actually committed an act of copyright infringement by "linking" and a precedent is set - where does it stop?

 

Linking is the very fabric of the Internet.

 

If FACT really cared and weren't just going for a "quick win" on a guy they'll basically bankrupt they would go after the owners of the fileservers hosting the actual infringed material!

 

It would be a very simple process for that guy to purchase a .ru domain from a Russian domain broker and re-launch his site hosted on Russian servers. He would be doing nothing illegal under their law and that would be that ...

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