Sunday Scare Tactics: Linking Is Not A Crime

[ 0 ] September 11, 2011 | NewRockstarPhilosophy

Have you heard about this 16 year old kid in the Czech Republic who’s facing a 5 million euro damages claim for linking to copyright works? It’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

Now the Czech arm of the Pirate Party is coming to the kid’s defence, escalating their “Linking is Not A Crime” camping with their new project described as “Facebook” for movies. It’s a sharing site called Moviehome and encourages users to upload links, reviews, subtitles and movie downloads.

“Sharing of links is a principle without which the Internet would cease to function,” says Pirate Party chairman Ivan Bartoš. “Therefore we’re systematically fighting against the criminalization of linking.”

In common with Piratskefilmy and Tipnafilm, the two file-sharing projects proceeding it, Moviehome has been created by programmers who are too afraid to reveal their identities in case they are hounded by the Anti-Piracy Union. The Pirate Party have no such fears, and say they have are yet to receive any complaints.

…While the Czech Pirates now have three file-sharing sites in their portfolio, adding Pirate Party Canada’s Travis McCrea’s site, Tormovies.org, means that a total of four Pirate-inspired movie download sites have been created in less than two months.

“We cannot lose this war,” says Ferjencik.

“In the unlikely case that the court ‘says linking is a crime’, the public uproar will get us into parliament. People hate it when they lose rights they already had, especially when they fought hard to obtain them.

“People did not carry out the revolution in 1989 to see students paying millions of Euros for helping others to share information.” (more here)