This week, a man was jailed for “facilitating copyright infringement” of films online, the first such case in Britain. Is this the first battle in the film industry’s war against pirates?
THE FEDERATION Against Copyright Theft (Fact) is a UK film organisation set up to ensure that no films are distributed illegally online for free. Made aware of a web search engine called Surfthechannel, which hosted links to illegal copies of popular films, it employed tactics straight out of a Hollywood spy thriller to bring about the prosecution of the site’s owner.
What Fact needed to do to present a case against Surfthechannel was to meet up with its owner, Anton Vickerman, a 38-year-old from Gateshead, get inside his house (from where he ran the website), and take photographs of his computer. Agents from the organisation got in touch with Vickerman by email saying they were interested in investing in his website. From that initial meeting, they were able to find out exactly where he lived. Then, posing as prospective house buyers, they got inside the house and photographed his computer. This evidence – directly linking Vickerman to the Surfthechannel site – was crucial in securing a prosecution. This week, after an eight-week trial, Vickerman was sentenced to four years in jail for “facilitating copyright infringement”. He is the first ever British citizen to be jailed for such an offence.
This is the first high-profile successful prosecution for a film industry that says it is now beginning to suffer just as much as the music industry from people putting up links to free material. Internet piracy continues to severely damage the music industry, with forced redundancies and lay-offs directly due to people not getting paid for the service they provide. While the film industry is not currently in the same state of crisis as the music industry, it is heading that way.
Surfthechannel was a popular website for people seeking to keep up with must-see TV dramas and the latest blockbuster releases. It attracted up to 400,000 visitors a day and it is estimated that Vickerman earned some £50,000 a month from advertising revenue generated by the site.
At the trial, prosecutors argued that Surfthechannel allowed illegal access to almost 6,000 films and TV shows and that the combined film and TV industries had lost between £52 million and £198 million since the site first went up in 2007. In sentencing Vickerman, Judge John Evans said: “Ultimately, films will not be made if the producers cannot make a profit.”
The site was so busy because Vickerman was able to supply illegal links to big film releases within 24 hours of their cinema openings. In some cases, he even carried links to major films a few weeks before they opened in cinemas. With popular US TV series he could provide a link within hours of the show being broadcast on US TV.
There are probably people reading this article who have visited Surfthechannel at some time to find a link to an episode of The Wire, Breaking Bad, Desperate Housewives or Lost, or to watch a current hit film. The site was easy to navigate and simple to use. The legal sites can be slow in putting up current popular content, and RTÉ and BBC rarely screen major TV dramas until months after their US release. There is a whole new TV-viewing generation who know exactly where to go to on the internet to download and watch their current favourite TV series. They see no harm in doing what hundreds of thousands of other people around the world are doing. Some assuage their consciences by promising to pay for the box-set of the show when it eventually gets a release.
Internet-savvy users simply prefer not to faff around with TV schedules and record buttons and have come to expect to be able to watch what they want, when they want – for free.
And no matter how swiftly or thoroughly bodies such as Fact attempt to monitor the internet for illegal links to copyrighted material, the very nature of technology ensures that as soon as one Surfthechannel site gets taken down, a number of similar services will spring up in its place.
This is a major problem, particularly if you know someone working in the film and TV industries who is currently without work due to falling revenues. Vickerman was caught but many aren’t. And no matter what resources are mobilised, the entire internet cannot be policed.
It is nowhere near as easy now as it was this time last year to find illegal links, but ultimately the entire entertainment industry needs to work on a “hearts and minds” approach, clearly explaining to people that by illegally downloading the new season of Breaking Bad (or whatever), they are partly responsible for trained and skilled people (with families and mortgages) being made unemployed.
You can’t fight the internet but you can appeal to people’s sense of fairness.
