TV-Links
Post by: McAsh
The article raises important questions, most importantly “should the owner of TV-Links have been arrested?”. My view is simple, and here is the petition I have signed. This isn’t the important question to be asking though.
I think a more important question is what will the effects on the internet be if this goes through? All he has done is link to copyrighted material, he has neither put it there nor allowed it to be there. Does linking to a libelous article put you at risk of being convicted of libel? And what about a link to a page that links to a page that… and so on.
Before we make a link must we have full knowledge of the nature of the content the site includes or intends to include in the near future. Remember - a link will remain active after the content it links to changes.
The internet is based entirely on hyperlinks, without them it cannot survive. So can we allow an advocate of our freedom to link be arrested?
Also, if you feel that the case is only trivial and unimportant please look at the emails on this article by The New Freedom.
November 4th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Utterly ridiculous.
The internet - especially the blagosphere - wouldn’t work without deep-linking, I can’t see that ever working.
And unless tvlinks was profiting heavily from advertising (which I spose it probably was) I can’t find anything immoral in what they were doing. They were providing a service in terms of compiling links together - it’s not their fault that the content available was all illegal.
And, like someone on the comments pointed out, it was educational in the sense that it promoted documentaries and things.FACT seem a bit confused - the fine’s astronomical.
I hope he’s let off this, I really do.
November 6th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Well, if somebody helped another with a crime such as murder, we’d expect them to be in the dock as well - after all, they’ve just assisted making a large number of people a lot worse off. Now, in principle, the same thing should happen with TV Links - clearly the motive here is to help others break the law.
However, in practice, the reason we have restrictions on intellectual property is so we don’t discourage the production of creative works - after all, people would have less incentive to produce movies, television programmes and songs if they’ll only get very little benefit from them. Nonetheless, the current lengths of copyrights are far too long - one study found the optimal length is only fourteen years, rather than the decades we currently have. Whilst people do consider their immediate benefit when producing, rarely does anyone think eighty years down the line.
So, how does this affect TV Links? Well, clearly it allows people to show that they’re not willing to take the monopolistic abuse of the current copyright laws and therefore I’d say it was in the public interest; clearly, it would be wrong to prosecute somebody who was acting for the good of the nation.
In any case, it’s not as if the alternative to watching TV links is buying the programmes: in a sense, they’re complements (if I find a new programme I like, I may go out and buy it). Or, in most cases, they’re bad-quality YouTube clips people only watch to procrastinate worthwhile things; if it was taken away, they’d do something else rather than buy the shows.
November 11th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Cicero - “Well, if somebody helped another with a crime such as murder, we’d expect them to be in the dock as well - after all, they’ve just assisted making a large number of people a lot worse off. “.
There is, I think, a large distinction to be made between murder and breach of copyright. It might be ethical in principle to treat the two the same way, but it is completely different - for one thing, assisting in murder is actualyl defined as a crime, whereas making it easier to access illegal content is not. It may affect more people, but in far less ways - production companies are increasingly looking towards other wasy to generate the moeny they lose through copyright infringement, such as product placement and so on.
TV Links Man was just providing a service to the people of the internet in terms of making locating things faster. There’s a few hundred other sites that do the same, as the article mentions. And, as the information’s out on teh web anyway, anyone who really did want to dedicate themselves to watching such and such a program would run extensive searches on Google etc to find it - it would still be around.
But the irony, like you said, is that anyone who does spend such a long time hunting for it would probably be a big fan, and so would buy the DVDs anyway, if just for the extras/better quality. So yes, I do agree with your last point.
October 29th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Keep up the good work.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Funny Videos…
Very funny, I liked it, thank you very much for brightening my day! :-)…