News TV piracy site shut down

Actually, you're quite wrong - that means that places like The Guardian (who reported this story) are promoting piracy as well? Heh, yeah... very unlikely.

We're reporting the news in much the same way, as piracy is apparently something quite relevant to bit-tech's tech-savvy readership... Regardless, it's not even worth the argument.

 

tv-links was begging to be shut down really, using there system and hosting in the UK = not the brightest idea in the world.

 

This will be a very interesting legal case, because as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been a proper test yet in the UK courts for hyperlinks.

The UK legislation on the issue (CDPA 1988) deals with secondary infringement in s22-25.
s22: importing an infringing copy - not really relevant
s23: possessing or dealing with an infringing copy - he doesn't possess them, but he may be distributing them in the course of a business, IF giving a hyperlink to a central source is distribution
s24(2): "...transmits the work by means of a telecommunications system, knowing or having reason to believe that infringing copies of the work will be made by means of the reception of the transmission"

Is uploading to a website "transmission" within the meaning of this sentence? Maybe. Even if it is, can you construe the viewing of a stream as "making a copy", any more than a television makes a copy of a live transmission?

The case is definitely arguable and will actually be quite major for UK law and websites generally.

EDIT:
Furthermore, if this is illegal, consider the following:

A direct link to a video is held to be illegal.

Then, what about a direct link to youtube with detailed instructions about what to search for?

If that were to be illegal, then what about a mention that the video is available on youtube without further instructions?

Is any link to youtube.com illegal, once there is knowledge that it generally holds copyright infringing material?

These seem to be in many senses quite fine lines and constructively similar to a tech-savvy user.

 

Any publicity is good publicity

 

So chav's wearing fake Burberry caps is good publicity for Burberry?

 

buhah ha bit-tech your going down "That still won't stop FACT from taking action against other websites that promote the distribution of copyrighted material though." I hearby promote distruibution of copyright matirial!

there bit-tech I have set FACT against you (who seem to be an orognisation held together by money and entertaining fiction rearly).

 

If I understood what you wrote properly... Oh noes!

 

Please oh no! We're doomed!

 

pfft, you don't care anymore you heathen

 

Disregarding the exact politics of this... why do they still fight it? It should be painfully obvious that they're not going to stop people using the internet to get their TV shows no matter how hard they try - so maybe it'd be in their best interest to make it work for them.

Someone's going to be putting up the torrents. If the content producers are the ones doing it, they could stick a 30-sec ad in the middle of a show, get some cash for it, and keep the would-be pirates happy. Other than the logistics of working out what they should charge for said ad (oh noes! we have to do our jobs!), it's win/win. No, of course people aren't going to keep tolerating this whole 30-minute block has 22 minutes of content thing (what's that, 1 ad:3 show or so?), and if they try that, it'll fail. If they use DRM, it'll fail. But if they make what people want work for them, it'll succeed greatly, probably lower their costs to some extent, and make everyone happy.

 

it's rather silly to shut down tv links, i.m.h.o.... they weren't hosting any of the content.. all of the content is still there on other sites! ah well, we'll just hafta wait till the next aggregator site shows up

Edit: any i definitely agree that a new price model would help alleviate some of this piracy ..if TV shows were cheaper i'd definitely pick up a couple seasons on DVD.

 

http://www.joost.com the first easy way to watch tv (with ads that pop up from time to time but only last 5 to 25 secs)

still an little buggy, it uses p2p based system like the BBCi player or the C4 one But does not try and run an service in the background that still runs when BBCi and C4 is not running, when joost is closed its closed

Note id not bother trying this program if your running Vista as its not stable on it (Use XP)

 

It still baffles me why people actually use torrents and crappy YouTube-quality video sites. What's wrong with Usenet? I get 700kbps constant at off-peak and around 400kbps constant peak downloads and there's everything on there...

- Sam

 

and veoh is kind of nice.... especially veoh tv.

 

last time i timed it

C3 & C4 have 3 Min's of adverts for each 15 minute slot (so a 30 minute show would have 6 Min's of ads)
All the other channels (that have slightly different ofcom rules) have 5 Min's of adverts for every 15 minute slot

And with digital distribution, because you don't have to pay for the airwaves or anything, and its not like any middle men are needed (sky, ntl, etc) so the price should be significantly lower

If multicast gets going on the Internet, distributing TV will become very cheap, and very effective

 

damn, my source of prison break gone... time to hit fanpop and see how weird 'fans' (fanatics) are

 

Not one to nit pick, but

'Maybe one of these days, the motion picture and music industries will come to their senses and work along side their customers instead of treating them like cattle. But then again, I have better odds of becoming a multi-millionaire than that happening.'

No offense, but anyone with any intelligence knows people use these 'services' to escape having to pay, not because of inconvenience or cost. You can bang on about the price of cds or games, but if you make educated purchases, you can't go wrong.

I bought ET:QW (Collectors edition) a couple of weeks ago, simply on the premise that, the developer made W:ET (originally planned as a full game, but released as a free game). I've spent, approximately +- 3000 hours playing that game competitively and felt that even though I'm not fond of the new game, they deserved the money from their previous effort.

I'm not going to take a morale high ground and say I've never downloaded something, because I have. I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I prefer buying proper DVD's and CD's simply because of the better quality. I bought Babel at the same time, and it cost eight quid. I mean, if you look in the right places, there really isn't an excuse for such large scale piracy issues. That's why I fully support initiatives like BBC iPlayer and Joost (except there is nothing worth watching on Joost)

 

Hmmm, i can go and buy a DVD in the shops for, £12 at the min probably, usually £16 (i think, i don't really pay attention these days)
Or i can buy food for the week, or a game

Film lasts 2 hours (max) food lasts a week, game 6-8 hours + MP time (although the game costs 3x as much)

So when are films good value, as to TV, if i already pay a TV licence, and have sky, what am i really pirating, whats the difference between watching it off the Internet and recording it off the air?

 

Games are good value in comparison to movies. I think of it this way, I spend five quid at the cinema to see a two/three hour movie. I spend 30 quid on a game, I should get 12-15 hours of game play. I never buy games which I know I won't either play to death, or play competitively. This ensures good value for money. You can spend thirty pounds on one meal, so that argument is quite redundant.

Films are what you make them. I used to go to the cinema every single week, regardless of what was on, because I knew there would be at least something watchable. It's something to do and talk about, it's sociable and it's entertainment. Again, the TV license I don't pay, but I use the BBC iPlayer and the BBC website a lot. So when the time comes, will I grumble about paying for it? Nope, because despite what you'll may believe, the BBC actually does have decent content. Most people aren't going to be pirating a movie which is on TV, it's likely to be a new release, as a solution of not going to the cinema.

To some it up! We're all becoming anti-social cheapskates.

 

Profit? So, i suppose the owners laughed as they downloaded each bit of content to their own server, burned it to disks, and passed it around? TV-Links really shouldn't have had any fault - they just link ot files, not host them. This sort of scaremonger ******** from the greeedy ****s of a dying industry needs to stop.