Interesting story here of how the cartel and its allies abuse the law to their advantage and get sites they dont like closed albeit with no evidence.
http://torrentfreak.com/busted-tv-show-site-in-limbo-as-authorities-back-off-081121/In October 2007, while most tech media attention was focused on the OiNK raid, another large site got police attention. TV-Links, which linked to videos on YouTube-like sites was raided and shutdown, with the admin arrested. A year later, we catch up with the ex-admin of TV-Links for the entire story.
When it became apparent that TV-Links.co.uk had been raided by police and the admin arrested, the news was met with some disbelief. TV-Links was a site that linked to videos that were hosted on video sharing sites like YouTube. It carried absolutely no illicit video content of its own.
Nevertheless, following an investigation by UK Trading Standards, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the police, the admin was arrested. At the time, FACT claimed that he was detained due to “offenses relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the Internet.” Except there was a problem.
There is no criminal offense of ‘facilitation of copyright infringement’ under English law. There would have been at least a civil offense if TV-Links had hosted the videos themselves, but they did not. Sites like YouTube and Dailymotion did, but the police or anti-piracy groups didn’t go after these giants. Indeed, the police themselves seemed to disagree with FACT’s reasoning for the raid, saying that the admin had been arrested for “supplying property with a registered trade mark without permission.”
…which raised another problem. The Trade Marks Act 1994 (specifically section 92) was designed to deal with physical, real-world counterfeit goods. Supplying links, if anything, could only be considered a service - definitely not a sale of physical goods. Getting a conviction on these grounds would be tricky, if not impossible. Considering the problems highlighted above, it’s no surprise that the TV-Links case has disappeared from the news radar.
You shouldnt be suprised to hear folks that nearly a year later no charges have been filed, if the admin was someone of means and had the money to sue those responsible for this "fakedown" then I,m sure we would be reading a different kind of news.
