Surfthechannel.com owner has been sentenced for four years prison by the UK authorities for the copyright infringement. Anton Vickerman, 38, founder of Surfthechannel, is the first British citizen in the United Kingdom who got this prison for running pirated content website.
Surfthechannel provided links of streaming pirated movies and TV shows to its user. After a private investigation, Anton Vickerman was convicted of two counts of conspiracy for facilitating copyright infringement, according to the Guardian. After an eight weeks trial, Newcastle crown court has given four years prison to Mr. Vickerman.
Surfthechannel is not like the Pirate Bay or Megaupload website and this link sharing site was built in 2007 by Vickerman. According to the report, 400,000 visitor visited this site per day. Besides, the site’s monthly income was approximately $55,000.
Kieron Sharp, director general of FACT said to the Guardian, “This case conclusively shows that running a website that deliberately sets out to direct users to illegal copies of films and TV shows will result in a criminal conviction and a long jail sentence.”
He also said that “Surfthechannel is not a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing. It was created specifically to make money from criminal activity.”
Source: CNET
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