Surfthechannel owner jailed for four years

United Kingdom

Khurram Aziz - News Editor

The owner of a website which provided links to copyright infringing films and TV shows has been sentenced to four years in prison.

Anton Vickerman, 38, was not charged with copyright infringement, but rather found guilty of "conspiracy to defraud" for running Surfthechannel.com.

The site reportedly earned him £35,000 a month in advertising revenue and at its peak attracted 400,000 visitors a day.

However, the site itself didn't host any copyright infringing material and instead provided links where such material could be sourced across the internet. Vickerman's conviction was based on the profits he made from providing these links.

The case started in 2008 when the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) hired a private investigator who posed as a potential home buyer to gain access to Vickerman's home. Police arrested Vickerman and his wife Kelly in a raid the following month, although she was found not guilty.

FACT welcomed the jail term as a warning to other websites that direct people to illicit content online.

"This case conclusively shows that running a website that deliberately sets out to direct users to illegal copies of films and TV shows will result in a criminal conviction and a long jail sentence," said Kieron Sharp, director general of FACT.

He said that unlike search engines such as Google and Microsoft's Bing - which have been criticised for pointing people to pirated material - Surfthechannel.com "was created specifically to make money from criminal activity".

However, critics of the private prosecution described the jail term as "deeply concerning, inappropriate and disproportionate".

Loz Kaye, leader of the Pirate Party UK, said the prosecution should never have been brought and was driven by private interests.

"The interest groups involved couldn't present a case of copyright infringement and decided to press for the use of the common law offence of ‘conspiracy to defraud' instead," Kaye said. "This offence is incredibly controversial in English law as it criminalises conduct by two or more parties that would not be criminal when performed by an individual."

"A four year prison sentence is twice the maximum that could have been handed down if Vickers had been charged with online copyright infringement," he added.

David Walbank, for the defence, told Newcastle crown court that Vickerman was now financially ruined and would likely be declared bankrupt. The court heard that the stress of the conviction had also caused the breakup of Vickerman's marriage.

The 38-year-old isn't the first person to be accused of hyperlinking to illegal material online for money. Alan Elis, operator of former music-sharing site Oink, was tried for conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown court, the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing, and found not guilty in January 2010.

Similarly, 22-year-old Richard O'Dwyer is facing extradition to the US for his link-sharing site, TVshack.net, which was closed down in November 2010. O'Dwyer could be sentenced to up to 10 years in jail for copyright infringement, although prosecutors in the UK have not charged him.