TV Links

» see tv-links.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 2007 i had ttnet adsl at home and a habit of finding english-language television the long way around. sites shaped like tv links were the entire method for a couple of years: you opened a page of links and clicked down the list until one of them actually played. i cannot honestly put this particular one in my rotation, because half a dozen of them looked identical from the outside and none lasted long enough to become a habit.

the site opened in october 2006 and was run by one person, david rock, then twenty six, out of gloucester in england. it stored no video at all. what it stored was an index: show name, season, episode number, and a link to a copy already sitting on youtube or dailymotion. later versions embedded the player so the video appeared to run inside tv links, which turned out to matter enormously to the people who eventually came for it.

on the morning of 18 october 2007 two police officers and three people from the federation against copyright theft arrived at rock's house at twenty past six, with roughly five trading standards officials behind them. they took his laptop, an older pc, his girlfriend's computer and several hard drives. the servers, which were in the netherlands, went dark around the same time. wikipedia dates the switch-off to the seventeenth and the contemporary reporting dates the raid to the eighteenth, and nothing found since closes that gap.

he was in custody about six hours and walked out without a charge. a year later he had heard nothing further from anybody, and the seized equipment was still being held for forensic analysis that never produced a prosecution.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was actually on it ~

the front page was a list of shows with links underneath each one, and the forum was where the links got repaired when they broke, which was constantly. about 37,000 people had accounts on that forum at the end. rock has said he took two to five dollars a day in donations, which covered the server bill and nothing beyond it, and that he never bothered to conceal who he was. his stated reason was flat: he did not really attempt to hide his identity, because under uk law linking to another site is not illegal.

~ the law they used ~

rock was arrested under section 92 of the trade marks act 1994, a statute that exists for people selling counterfeit goods. the search warrant also cited section 16a of the video recordings act 1984. neither is a copyright provision, and that was not carelessness. at the time nobody in britain could say with confidence whether pointing at an infringing file was itself an infringement, so the case was built out of whatever else was available. struan robertson, a lawyer at pinsent masons, told the register that week he had never heard of trademark law being used for anything like this.

~ what happened to the case ~

nothing happened to the case. no charge was ever brought. fact kept the machines, the investigation stayed open in the way an investigation stays open when nobody intends to finish it, and the site never returned. the domain went to a holding page in 2008 and has changed hands repeatedly since, and none of what sits there now has any connection to the original.

what tv links demonstrated is that a takedown does not require a conviction. the site died at half past six on a thursday morning in october, and the legal question that would have decided whether it was ever illegal simply never got asked.

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