Web Site TV Links Present Unique Legal Dilemma

At its barest, a situation seems relatively straight forward: internet piracy is both wrong and illegal, and if the creators of the film or show are not generating a revenue for it, it should probably not be on the internet if a copyright exists. Therefore, it seems relatively common sense-oriented to suggest that should a web site have a voluminous archive of movies, both new and old, on and off the big-silver screen, it should be shut down and the web master held accountable for their internet piracy. What happens, however, when the web site you find your pirated internet videos on is not actually hosting anything, and acts more as a catalog to already pirated or streamed videos?

This is the conundrum that befell UK police after arresting David Rock, the owner of popular streaming video website TV-Links. Recognized as among the most reliable and thorough libraries of streaming film, documentary, show and anime on the internet, it was considered by some to be a haven of movie theft and piracy. Without a doubt it was a thorn in the side of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), who pursued Rock thoroughly.

On October 18, 2007, fans of the web site found only an error, warning that the page was no longer up, as news trickled out that David Rock had been arrested in a raid by British police, while the servers in the Netherlands were shut down. The rationale was that the site contributed to the overall problem of movie piracy, which cost Hollywood 450 million pounds, or roughly $650 million. Although a disclaimer warned that none of the data was actually hosted on the servers, many excuses were thrown out, such as how in order to link a streaming video, one must download the files to their temporary internet files.

Other rationales were used, such as the argument that there's no age checks in place to stop minors from viewing potentially adult content on the website.

Ultimately, none of these stuck, however, as David Rock was later released without charge on October 25th, realizing that, fundamentally, TV-Links was not violating any laws. The argument strongly used by Rock and his attorneys was that the website hosted nothing on its own servers, and rather linked to remote servers that were already streaming the information, usually in Korea and China, where such laws are far less strict than the United States and Britain.

The struggle was best described by the Guardian Unlimited, in which it said:

"If linking is illegal, we might as well shut down the Internet, because there is no practical way anybody can guarantee the legality of what's on the end of any link. Even if you could guarantee it at the time of linking, there's no guarantee it would still be legal less than a second later, or for the rest of time."

Throughout the entire situation, David Rock insisted on his own innocence of any crime, swearing that he'd gone through the laws before taking up what he called a "hobby", and verified that there was nothing wrong with what he was doing. For all the excuses used, however, the fundamental charge that they planned to use on Rock was Section 92 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, which made it illegal to falsely apply signs to a good that could be mistaken for a registered trademark.

At this time, with the difficult legal question still in the air, David Rock has been released, and he re-opened his web site, utilizing all the same, previous habits, and continuing to prove a burden to the Film Industry and FACT.

The question at hand, however, is whether or not one can be held accountable for the links that are on their website - something TV-Links advocates argue undermines the entirety of the internet, and threatens the well being of web users in general.

Sources:

-TV-Links
-This is Gloucestershire
-Guardian Unlimited Blog