The owner of Surfthechannel.com - a UK site that provided links to illegally copied TV shows and films - has been sentenced to four years in jail. He was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud for "facilitating" copyright infringement.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19253359

As long as each nation is taking action against there own citizens for copyright infringement then I am cool with that.

One of the biggest problems with stamping out piracy in the digital age is that there are few borders in cyberspace. Each nation has their own standards on what piracy is. Often if a pirate based in country "A" steals and distributes copywrited material belonging to a developer in country "B" the prosecuters in country "A" don't see it as a big problem.

The way for it to work is that the distributors in your nation are paying for the rights to sell a film/game/music in your nation. When someone in your nation is breaching copyright laws then they are stealing from the local distributor, therefore your law enforcement should step in to take action.

 

The USA can't take this on all alone as they need partners for this battle to work. Each nation has to clean up locally on behalf of the distributors in their nation and the end consumer.

 

Piracy does increase that ticket price at the movies, that price per video game or music content so in the end we the consumer are the losers.

Yes, it is interestng that in the US the 7th Circuit Court recently threw out a preliminay injunction against MyVidster.com (Flava Works Inc v. Marques Rondale Gunter, dba MyVidster.com) that was granted by the district court under the theory that myVidster,com was a contributory copyright infringer by posting links to streaming content Flava Works claimed was "pirated". The court found that posting links did not contribute to infringement (the infringement was in the uploading of the work originally) nor was it a "public performance" of a protected work. Unless Flava Works is able to provide other evidence at trial, it doesn't seem like this is going to go much farther. Flava Works' remedy is to provide a DMCA takedown notice to the site hosting the infringing content and then pursue the infringers civilly, or convincing a prosecutor to prepare a criminal case.

 

scott s.

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Under copyright law, infringement of copyright or copyright-related rights, the infringer shall pay compensation in accordance with the actual loss of the rights holders; the actual loss is difficult to calculate compensation in accordance with the infringer's illegal gains.

The court found that posting links did not contribute to infringement (the infringement was in the uploading of the work originally) nor was it a "public performance" of a protected work.

 

Isn't that, in effect, what ThePirateBay argued?

They all seem to go after the little guys but no one takes on google, they have.. i can only guess they have been providing billions of links to pirate software over the years, they wont even black list/block sites that provide pirate software in there search engine.

 

I was looking for some flight sim related info the other day and it was pointless as all it pointed me to was illegal downloads :(

 

The likes of google dont go far enough to stop internet piracy on there search engine.

I doubt that would really help... There are loads of other smaller search engines out there, for example ones on this list:

 

http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/

 

Probably forcing them all to block pirate sites would be hard, and I am sure that there are loads of other search engines out there too.

Very true it would be hard to block them but with google they can find every picture of cats but they cant automate the search for.. as an example windows 7 torrent or Pink Floyd torrent and flag them for attention by staff to check, there current policy of.. if no one complains then its ok is wrong.

Very true it would be hard to block them but with google they can find every picture of cats but they cant automate the search for.. as an example windows 7 torrent or Pink Floyd torrent and flag them for attention by staff to check, there current policy of.. if no one complains then its ok is wrong.

I can't imagine how many extra staff they'd need to employ to check every single link to something that might be an illegal torrent. Sure, Win7 or Pink Floyd are obvious, but how about small-scale piracy*, such as FS commercial content? Or the work of far more obscure artists in the world of music or art?

 

Also I think it's pretty much established that the actual holder of IP rights has to be the one to legally challenge potential copyright infringement. It might be desirable for Google or other search engines to police this stuff, but it just isn't practical.

 

Bear in mind too that Google, in revealing pirate sites through its search engine, is actually enabling rights-holders to identify pirates' URLs.

 

*I know it isn't small-scale to the victims. I mean in comparison to million-selling commercial content suppliers.

I have heard that some smaller developers of flight sim addons find it very very hard to get google to remove links to people that have shared links to pirate software, Maybe if they allowed there users to report links, with a report link for disallowed content it would be a start that way we all could help them filter out the content that should not be on there.

 

But anyway my point is they have to power to do more but they dont with more and more criminal cases against people who provide links to content now its only a matter of time before some company goes after google for providing links as we have moved in to the sue to make money age.

 

One of the features i like about my anti-virus software is the ability to rate links in search engines although it wont stop much it allows me to help send information about these links if they are dodgy or related to pirate software.

". . . its only a matter of time before some company goes after google for providing links as we have moved in to the sue to make money age."

 

I don't see that being successful, since it would be analogous to a publisher of a phone directory being sued for providing numbers & addresses of disreputable companies or individuals.