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.

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.