I’ve just been sent an interesting article about the, now infamous, tv-links.co.uk website. For those that don’t know TV Links provided links to TV shows online and in effect gave people the opportunity to view them. From my understanding they didn’t actually host anything themselves, rather just gave people one central location to find links. Like Yahoo did in the early days of the Internet. The big difference this time, is that by providing links to copyrighted content, they have stepped on a few rather big toes, and made themselves a very big target.

The site has now been raided by the police and taken offline, and from the report I’ve just read, the 26 year old from Cheltenham responsible for the site, has been taken into custody… The extra shocking thing about this case, is that not only the owner, but also the moderators associated on the site have been accused of organised crime and could they could now face a possible law suit of £100,000,000 between them which is apparently the amount ‘lost’ by ‘injured’ companies. The other extraordinary thing, is the scale of the operation, which involved international policing; the site was actually hosted on servers in the Netherlands.

Whatever your view on copyright infringement, I think this case does bring to light a scary reality. That someone can be arrested for doing in a small way, what Google (arguably the biggest player on the Internet) does in a much larger way; by providing people with links to content. Why don’t the big companies chase Google and every other search engine, surely it’s exactly the same. They also facilitate people to commit copyright crime, therefore aren’t they aiding in a crime and should be brought to ‘justice’?

We can’t have one rule for the rich and another for everyone else! Read all about it in the article here.

This follows on from another article I came across last week, where a lady in America was being sued for an enormous amount, having lost her case brought by the RIAA. Where will it all end?