UK piracy site shut down by FACT

> It's thought that about £459m was lost to the material on the site.

Have you considered a career in tech journalism on the BBC?

That would be about £8 per person in Britan...

Family guy isn't shown on terrestial analogue, and up to date Simpsons isn't either. 

All the other shows (Lost, Pinky and the Brain) etc aren't shown at all, at least on free-to-air tv. 

A lot of people I know have found these links to family guy, and gone on to buy box sets etc. 

People who missed the beginning of Lost keep their interest up by watching the beginning on the interwebz..

Apart from this extortionately over-estimated figure, do FACT even have any legal jursitiction in England? or have we got another MPAA on our hands? 

Me thinks the British won't bend over and take it as easily as Americans

"It's thought that about £459m was lost to the material on the site."

But the site didn't host anything, right? In that case, surely Google and YouTube are next in line for 'facilitating copyright infringement'..?

What a load of old cock.

Where do they get this figure of 459m of lost revenue. 

Its not lost if you never had it, do they really believe that the people using this site to share information will run out and get sky/virgin/bt services now? 

Of course they won't most will now use a torrant or related service to get their files, which must be worse for FACT seeing as they can then be shared where as the streaming videos were normally gone in 24 hours anyway.

[We are not responsible for the spelling of our readers. Or our own. Ed.]

Look up a funking demand curve before quoting the 459million figure!

People choose to "consume" ie download at price zero (free), but to say all the downloaders would have paid £15 per DVD is a load of balls.

I think the confusion is that the £495 mill figure came is the total lost to piracy in a year.

"The British Video Association estimates that at least £459m was lost to the video, film and TV industries due to piracy in 2006."

makes me laugh really... this guy didnt even make any money out of his site really.... when will the industry learn we dont pirate because it makes us rich. we do it because we dont want to pay extortionate rates for programs and movies which these days 9/10 are total crap.

the odeon near me is £8 to £10 a ticket... why would i pay that? it used to be £3.50!

same goes for music... when cds are under a fiver i will buy them. bands make nearly no money on cds so it doesn't hurt the artists - they make their money from advertising, live shows and merchandise and the record deal in itself, if anything its the best advertising any type of media can get, you can get your product into homes for next to nothing, if your product is really that good then people will go and buy it anyway for example i would have never known of tool... i downloaded, then went out and bought the cds... since then ive bought every one of their cds when they have been released..

i own hundrerds possible nearly thousands of cds none of which i really bought before napster came along.

same goes for films, films like kontrol, city of god, amores perros... downloads led to buying the dvds...

this poor guy only had links to videos he didnt even host them.... FACT, its a FACT your a - bunch of pr!cks

£459million? Lunacy. Perhaps a person watching material on the internet would just not watch the material if they had to pay for it through purchase of DVDs or being forced to pay for Sky to watch their favourite shows. Thus quoting that figure is pure speculative rubbish. It's not like X amount of DVDs were robbed or the company was robbed. 
What is the difference to watching a borrowed dvd?

You describe it as a "UK piracy site" - can't be bothered to wait for a conviction in a court then? Your say it is a "website which linked to copyrighted material" - so is The Inq, so is any news website.

Targetting a site which simply links to content is hardly going to solve their "problem". The traffic has just shifted to other sites.

Look at the alexa ranks of sites like www.joox.net and www.alluc.org. Up Up Up.

And new sites are appearing too. www.tioti.com has added tv links to is feature set and www.tvcatchup.com is actually offering to record material for you so you don't need any links at all.


... with all these comments. There are much more serious things to worry about in the world.

F.A.C.T. or FICTION

£459million It would be interesting to see exactly where this figure has come from.... LA LA land most prob...
and this is revenue lost because of a site that dosnt host anything???? hmm... there is most certainly something wrong with the picture here, looks like a case of `who can we try and make an example of`. 

which brings me to my next question, how much did it cost to bust this person and how much wil they get back from a coviction, i can guarentee the maths wont add up there either........ its just a complete wast of taxpayers money.. leave the guy alone, hes a student for gods sake... 

ask yourself this... quo bono? (who profits) 

looks like tabloid propaganda if you ask me...

it seems to me its the bbc again complaining about tv licences when all the uk tv channels are pumping out adverts every 5 minutes making extra revenue there all owned or part shared by the bebe so come on big brother where is the freedom of the interenet F.A.C.T by any other name

Just type into google whavever you want to watch! It will find all the results this site had if not more.

The US is so far ahead of us with TV shows, why should we be 12 months behind them!?

FACT I believe are responsible for the "piracy is theft" adverts that liken downloaidng a movie to stealing a car!

The only mistake this guy did was host the site in the UK it wont be as hard to shut down the other Movie Links as that rely's on User's linking the new movies them selfs, moslty hosted in Malaysia. They create LAWS for everything they now even want to create laws on Cyberspace LMAO they just wont win just like th War on drugs (The drugs are still winning)



Surely everyone that slaps a link to a youtube vid on their facebook/myspace and any other Socialising shite site is is breaking the same shite rules.

Same for the likes of Vuze.com / and other similar media sites.

its all gone Rules mad.. the internets not what it used to be.

Googles to blame the web hungry Ba*tards , long gone are websites with no adverts on with content you want to see.

Surley people'facilitating copyright infringement'are those flogging ringtones. think they should target this W*nk sites that are ripping off ringtones and selling them for stupid money. 


What a complete load of %$^%^ they did nothing wrong they moan about the loss of money right but erm how come they are all still have plenty of money. I enjoyed Tv-links there was a great variety on there for everyone. Inside of this Copyright rubbish why not stop the real criminals killing kids and stuff for god sake!!

thats bull.. i have brought every episode/ film i watched here and liked, i was only waiting for uk release dates and couldnt wait any longer, eg.. i have watched all of heroes, and started on s2, and have already pre-ordered my boxset for dec release...

Futile. . . . .MPAA and FACT need to wise up and realise what the consumer wants, the consumer usually gets. Rather than try and stop the giant 'pirate' snow ball thats already rolling they need to ask themselves what consumers do want, and utilise the technology that up and till now has been there nightmare, if they used up all there energy of denial of the current state of cunsumers needs, maybe they may be actually able to move with the times and come up with something new and innovative

J

I agree with Sallys comment, a load of old cock. I used tvlinks to catch up with episodes I missed, not watch the whole series for free.
You can't lock someone up for linking to sites!?!?!?! And for us legal users paying for digital subscriptions, why the frak are there adverts ASWELL as the subscriptions!?!?!
Money grabbing suits....

Bummer men..!! :( it's totally unfair. he wasn't doing anything illegal, just linking, not hosting... everybody links, are we all outlaws now..?!!? LOL Anyway, i found the best replacement: http://www.sidereel.com they have all the tv series and tons of movies and music vids... there’s also stage 6 or dailymotion... we have plenty of alternatives.. he he

It doesn't help when people blithely quote gross estimates for piracy issued by the industry themselves. Neither does it pay to generalise. 

Google searches the web for anything, then links to what it finds. TV-Links didn't search, and its sole purpose was to link to other people's copyrighted material. If people are going to compare, they should use a like for like comparison.

As for FACT, they are a British based unit dealing with all types of piracy. They appear to have been acting on a complaint from Pixar/Disney over their film Ratatouille being linked by TV-inks.

As for TVCatchup.com, these guys have done their legal homework, and setup a web based PVR. Nice site


wat a lowd O bolux

I really don't get how you are responsible for copyrights of the links you promote on your site? 
Please explain it to me because as far as I'm concerned following FACT logic Google should be illegal and shot down as they contain a link to TV-Links and other sites like it. 
Isn't that the same thing in effect as TV-Links containing links to all sorts of content both legal and illegal?

:/

After reading up on this story, one can only assume that such a charge of "facilitation" would crumble if taken to court in this case. There is absolutely no case against the owner or staff of tv-links. Whats more is that IF such a case against "linking" ever went this far, it would be the courts and the Copyrights Enforcement Agencies obligation to take said action against al lknown similar cases. In view of the aforementioned point, tv-links did not break any applied law or breach any distribution laws of featured media. In short, if tv-links is found to have broken the law, then so Google, Youtube etc. are in breach of said applied law. 

If tv-links is found to be in breach of any such laws and subsequently held responsible for the losses aggregated by the Movie Industry and Google etc are not tried in the same frame of law it would be a huge and groundbreaking case of a miscarriage of justice by both the prosecutors and the British legal system.