Surfthechannel owner sentenced to 4 years jail after piracy conviction
Posted in: Online TV/Music at 15/08/2012 22:05
The owner of Surfthechannel.com - a site that provided links to illegally copied TV shows and films - has been sentenced to four years in jail.
It used to be one of the UK's most popular sources of pirated content.
Anton Vickerman, from Gateshead, had designed the service's pages, hiring others to source material and carry out other back-end functions.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19253359
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Surfthechannel owner sentenced to four years over piracy
A 38-year-old Briton who made £35,000 a month through a website that linked to pirated copies of films and TV shows has been sentenced to four years in prison.
Anton Vickerman, whose surfthechannel.com website had around 400,000 users a day, was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to defraud in June following an eight-week trial at Newcastle crown court.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/aug/14/anton-vickerman-surfthechannel-sentenced
Pirate website owner gets four years. But what about Google?
Four years is longer than the average jail term for assault or burglary. But that is the sentence received by Anton Vickerman of Gateshead today, after he had been found guilty of two counts of "conspiracy to defraud" by running a website, surfthechannel.com, that linked to pirated films and more.
Piracy is illegal of course and Vickerman was running a site that was so popular that its profits were estimated at £300,000 a year at its height. But there is nobody angrier about piracy than the vast film and music industries, whose businesses are said to suffer from the practice. To them a four-year sentence is a coup.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/aug/14/pirate-website-owner-four-years
