Anti-Piracy Laws Gone Wild: Teenager Faces Years in Prison for Just Linking to Copyrighted Material

The 16-year-old owner of the website cinema-world.biz is facing jail time after being caught by a Czech anti-piracy outfit for merely linking to copyrighted material.

The blog ZeroPaid summarized a Czech Anti-Piracy Union press release:

[I]n short, the website owner offered links to copyrighted material and was subsequently busted. Since he is a youth, his sentence would be automatically reduced. While the press release provides some of the evidence they have against him, a more recent interview reveals that the owner believes the numbers shown were inflated. The interview is on Pirate Newspaper (Google translated, original) He had some interesting interesting things to say about the incident including the following:

(when asked if there was any copyrighted material located on his servers)

          I did not load anything anywhere, everything was copied from similar sites.

(on the profitability of such a site)

          Well, it was about two months after starting full operation the second site, it was a text ad. The reason was simple: The site has  been increasingly difficult for hosting and I could not afford such a pay hosting alone. I went mainly to finance the operation itself, from the beginning I was not profitable.

The anti-piracy group also alleged that the site has 15.5 million visitors (over what period of time, I'm not sure), but the teenage owner of cinema-world.biz says the his average visitor count is more like 7,000 per day.

As the blog post notes, sites like cinema-world.biz are a dime a dozen, so "knocking out two would barely even be considered a drop in the bucket."

Some might suggest that this is a sign of desperation for anti-piracy outfits to get a high profile conviction into the media. Outside of being able to write a few press releases, I really don’t see how taking down a tiny site like cinema-world.biz will really have an effect on what they perceive as piracy operations around the world.

Still it all seems pretty over the top to go after a kid with a few thousand followers who links to copyright content.