TV-Links Is No More

For the past 6 months, I’ve had my television set turned off for about 80 percent of my TV viewing. As much fun as I previously had trying to choose between watching a re-run of Malcolm in the Middle I’d seen four times vs. Mad TV, I came to prefer watching something I actually enjoyed.

You see, I’d found this amazing site called tv-links.co.uk. While providing no actual copyrighted or trademarked material, the site featured links to all of my favorite shows and movies. Even the ones dating back to when I was in middle school (who remembers Saved By The Bell). If I wanted to watch the new episode of House on Wedneday night, instead of Tuesday night, because I go rock climbing on Tuesday nights, I could. I could watch the new Pirates of the Caribbean at 2AM on Friday night, or see last Sunday’s Family Guy during my break at work.

But all this tv-related bliss was shut down yesterday, as the 26-year-old creator of the site, who hails from Cheltenham, England, was taken into custody for trademark violations. This occured after an investigation by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the local trading standards office. Initial reports from FACT said he had been arrested for “offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the Internet”.

There are so many things wrong with what happened here:

1) FACT was not in any way created to deal with trademark materials being viewed over the internet. If the English government wants to stop people from linking to trademarked material, it needs to pass new laws.
2) Prohibiting people from linking to trademarked material would mean that every single search engine is in violation of the law.
3) Why would FACT go after the person linking to trademarked material, rather than the people actually PUBLISHING trademarked material.
4) Within two weeks another copy of tv-links.co.uk will be created, except this time it will be located outside of England in a country with looser trademark laws. And it will take me at least a few weeks to find that site. So now I have to read books for the next months because the stuff that’s actually on tv right now is terrible.
5) The English government will likely spend millions of dollars on this whole investigation when it could be using those resources to stop ACTUAL crimes.
6) There is a HUGE market for watching TV and Movies over the internet, with the potential for billions of dollars to be made by the major television stations and movie companies. It is easier to track viewers and ad-clicks, cheaper to run, and allows them to provide all their material at once to consumers, rather than one show every 30 minutes or one movie every week. Without tv-links.co.uk, I watched about 2-3 hours a week of TV (not counting football). With tv-links.co.uk, I watched at least double that, maybe even triple.
7) If some 26-year-old guy in England can provide this service, how come a multi-billion dollar industry is unable to?

This whole thing reminds me of Napster in the 90’s. The music industry lost billions of potential money by trying to stick to its old business model rather than simply trying to give people what they wanted, and figuring out how to make money with a new technology. It looks to me like TV networks and Movie studios have decided to ignore billions in potential profits in resistance to change.

Unfortunately, this may prove even more disasterous for the tv/movie industry than the music industry. Eventually, Steve Jobs came along and provided I-Tunes, and the music industry gradually has come to accept this new technology (albeit too little and too late). Right now, Chinese sites are basically allowed to post copyright infringed materials. What’s to stop them from taking all the tv shows and movies ever produced, put them all on a website, and charge people an insanely small flat rate (say 3 cents a minute) to watch whatever they want, whenever they want. If the entertainment industry keeps sitting on their hands like this, they may find that all their copyrighted material that they could have made billions off of are lining someone else’s pockets.