Tv-links.co.uk was the best known online tv shows website. I say was because it’s future is uncertain and most likely it will not come back to life. The owner was arrested and the domain seems to be parked. This is all thanks to Federation Against Copyright Theft or FACT for short. The news was initially reported by the Guardian and it was picked up by Wired. This is not a typical web-piracy-crackdown-operation by any means. Tv-links never hosted any content, it only linked to content on sites such as YouTube, Tudou, Google Videos, 56.com and several others. But that did not stop FACT which managed to enforce its policies on several EU countries. This became clear when a tv-links moderator in Ireland was also arrested.

Sites such as tvlinksdb, a smaller version of tv-links, get a lot of traffic and generate a handsome revenue. According to tvlinksdb, the site generates 400,000 unique visitors per month and a little over a million pageviews. Going by these stats tv-links must have generated ten times as much traffic if not more. But these sites are nothing compared to the video hosting services which serve the alleged copyrighted files to the viewer. For some unknown reason FACT seems to only go after the little guy and do nothing about the big video sharing sites. The worse part is no one seems to care that tv-links only provided the link and shows included documentaries, public interest films, cartoons, Google Tech Talks which are already freely available.

Soon after tv-links went down several sites started posting articles with alternative links. One of the most famous ones is a Blogspot blog with a single article listing 38 sites similar to tv-links. It received more than 4,000 diggs. I also came across a petition floating around on the internet supporting tv-links. But as of this post nothing has made any difference. Tv-links continues to be down. With little chance of ever recovering from this injustice the website will be greatly missed by the entire internet community.