TV-Links owner arrested..

[Kriista]

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9066/TVLin ... rrested%21

Probably the most popular video streaming site around has been busted by UK authorities.

It's a sad day for streaming video fans everywhere as news has been reported that TVLinks has been shut down and the owner, a 26yo man from Chelteham in the UK, was arrested.

Though not hosting an actual content himself, and rather merely providing links to where particular titles can be found, he was nonetheless apparently charged for the "facilitation" of copyright infringement.

"Sites such as TV Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organizing, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites," said a spokesman for Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) today.

What makes the charges so odd is that he was again, only providing LINKS to pirated content, and not actually hosting any such material. Can linking really be considered "facilitation?" If I link to TVLinks am I then a co-conspirator?

FACT goes on to revisit the same old diatribe about how piracy is stealing food from form the tables of people who work in the film industry, but with guys like Brad Pitt reportedly getting $20million bucks to make trash like "Babel" who's really robbing who? Couldn't Pitt be paid a little less, say $15 million, and leave that other 5 for the "starving" film crew? I guess not

"The theft and distribution of films harms the livelihoods of those working in the UK film industry and in ancillary industries, as well as damaging the economy," said FACT's director general Kieron Sharp.

What's even more surprising is that the move was part of an overall strategy to crack down on piracy, though all it does is target a middleman who tells you where to go. More importantly, will its demise really compel people to find content legally or to suddenly run down to their local cinema? I think not, and all it means, as is usually the case with piracy, is that people will just go elsewhere.

Either way R.I.P. TVLinks, it was nice while it lasted. Maybe once again we have a case where Sweden's the only answer.

Tv-links was a great site. It will be missed.

But what is notable here is that if linking to piracy is 'facilitating' that opens up a big can of worms, as the internet is nothing but links. How close to the 'source' do you have to be for it to be facilitating.

I hope the RIAA/FACT/whoever go after someone with deep pockets who wants to fight them. I think ownership laws are a little outdated when dealing with digital media, and its implications.


I highly reccomend seeing/reading some of Lawrence Lessig's(Stanford Law Prof, and founder of Creative Commons Liecense) lectures/books.

Here's a youtube of one of his presentations/lectures.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JWR6eiiBhf8

[Keverian FireCry]

That sucks. I tried to use it last night and thought something bad might've happened. Anyone know of another site like that?

[Kriista]

ovguide.com

thats like a 'mother' site, you can search from there all the video sites, and it has a (constantly) updated list of video streaming sites

openflv.com is pretty nice too, very simple/clean (no bombardment of ads)

[Nick]

Fucking hell, what a pain in the arse. That is fucking lame.

[Sargeras]

joox.net is great too.

[Kriista]

OiNK is gone now as well...

http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20071023.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/engl ... 057812.stm

British and Dutch police today shut down the world’s biggest source of illegal pre-release chart albums and arrested a 24-year old man in an operation coordinated between Middlesbrough and Amsterdam.

The raids, which were coordinated by Interpol, follow a two-year investigation by the international and UK music industry bodies IFPI and BPI into the members-only online pirate pre-release club known as OiNK.

OiNK specialised in distributing albums leaked on to the internet, often weeks ahead of their official release date. More than 60 major album releases have been leaked on OiNK so far this year, making it the primary source worldwide for illegal pre-release music.

The site, with an estimated membership of 180,000, has been used by many hardcore file-sharers to violate the rights of artists and producers by obtaining copyrighted recordings and making them available on the internet.

It is alleged that the site was operated by a 24-year-old man in the Middlesbrough area, who was arrested today. The site’s servers, based in Amsterdam, were seized in a series of raids last week. OiNK’s operator allegedly made money by setting up a donations account on the site facilitated by PayPal.

Cleveland Police and the FIOD-ECD SCHIPOL branch of the Dutch police undertook the raids, supported by Interpol, as part of a carefully-planned international investigation with anti-piracy investigators from IFPI and BPI.

OiNK used peer-to-peer technology called BitTorrent to distribute music. Torrent sites such as OiNK act as a library for torrent files. BitTorrent is the most popular software for internet file sharing and OiNK was the best-known for pre-release piracy.

Pre-release piracy – a growing problem

Pre-release leaks are one of the most damaging forms of internet piracy that is currently eroding legitimate sales of music across the world. Recorded music sales fell by more than a third internationally in the last six years, and independent studies show that a major factor in this decline has been internet users accessing peer-to-peer networks to steal music online.

Pre-release piracy is particularly damaging to sales as it leads to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the internet months ahead of the release.

I'm curious about those 'independent studies'. It could be that people are tired buying shitty music for outrageous prices.

OiNK was a nice site, I had only been a member for about a year, but they had OMGIAMRETARDEDCAUSEALOTISTWOWORDS of high quality stuff. Overall I prefer soulseek, as a ratio-based system is inherantly biased against esoteric material.

[Xouqoa]

Pre-release piracy – a growing problem

Pre-release leaks are one of the most damaging forms of internet piracy that is currently eroding legitimate sales of music across the world. Recorded music sales fell by more than a third internationally in the last six years, and independent studies show that a major factor in this decline has been internet users accessing peer-to-peer networks to steal music online.

Pre-release piracy is particularly damaging to sales as it leads to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the internet months ahead of the release.

I find that hard to believe, really. Maybe people are just tired of getting gouged for a CD and the artist not getting any of the proceeds.

The new Radiohead album was on sale digitally by the band. The band asked for donations in exchange for the album and got an average of 8$ per album. They sold 1.2M albums. Sales are at about $10 million in one week, that’s more than their last three albums combined did during their respective launch weeks.

[Funkmasterr]

I for one can say that if cd's were cheaper (5-7 dollars maybe) I would buy a lot more of them as opposed to downloading them.

I know we have had this conversation here multiple times, but that's how I feel about it, and I am guessing I am a long long ways from the only one.

[Kriista]

Great read:
http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/w ... th-of.html

For quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one - such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue.

For the past eight years, I've worked on and off with major record labels as a designer ("Major" is an important distinction here, because major labels are an entirely different beast than many indie labels - they're the ones with the power, and they are the ones driving the industry-wide push against piracy). It was 1999 when I got my first taste of the inner-workings of a major record label - I was a young college student, and the inside of a New York label office seemed so vast and exciting. Dozens of worker bees hummed away at their desks on phones and computers. Music posters and stacks of CDs littered every surface. Everyone seemed to have an assistant, and the assistants had assistants, and you couldn't help but wonder "what the hell do all these people do?" I tagged along on $1500 artist dinners paid for by the labels. Massive bar tabs were regularly signed away by record label employees with company cards. You got used to people billing as many expenses back to the record company as they could. I met the type of jive, middle-aged, blazer-wearing, coke-snorting, cartoon character label bigwigs who you'd think were too cliche to exist outside the confines of Spinal Tap. It was all strange and exciting, but one thing that always resonated with me was the sheer volume of money that seemed to be spent without any great deal of concern. Whether it was excessive production budgets or "business lunches" that had nothing to do with business, one of my first reactions to it all was, "so this is why CDs cost $18..." An industry of excess. But that's kind of what you expected from the music business, right? It's where rock stars are made. It's where you get stretch limos with hot tubs in the back, where you get private jets and cocaine parties. Growing up in the '80's, with pop royalty and hair metal bands, you were kind of led to think, of course record labels blow money left and right - there's just so much of it to go around! Well, you know what they say: The bigger they are...

Pretty insightful article. On the long side, but I think it sums up well the current state/future of the music industry.

[miir]

Pretty insightful article. On the long side, but I think it sums up well the current state/future of the music industry.

Insightful my ass....

"so this is why CDs cost $18..."

He may know his stuff when it comes to art and design but he knows shit about how the retail sales supply chain works. If you were to remove the costs related to the logistics, distribution and (brick and mortar) sales of the physical product, you would be left with a unit price of 5-6 dollars.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, I worked at every level of retail music sales and distrubution. I worked as a grunt in a record shop, I worked as a buyer with the largest retail music distributor in Canada. I worked in their parent warehouse and I also worked in sales for WEA (warner) Canada. I saw how the markup could go from a per unit price of $5 in a catalogue to a rack price of $19.99.

To blame major labels for the prices of CDs is pretty fucking far off the mark.