“A very British miscarriage of justice" ? 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. He is the first British man to be jailed in the UK for a website that linked to illegal copies of films and TV shows. Vickerman, from Gateshead, set up the website in 2007 as an index of online videos – both legal and illegal – hosted elsewhere on the internet. Prosecutors said Vickerman made £250,000 in profit through adverts on the site in 2008, the year in which he tried to sell it for £400,000. He was not charged on copyright offences, but was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to facilitate copyright infringement following a private prosecution pursued by the anti-piracy lobby group Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).
Surfthechannel owner sentenced after piracy conviction. 14 August 2012Last updated at 10:54 ET Surfthechannel.com indexed links to online videos but did not host the media files itself 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. The 38-year-old was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud in June for "facilitating" copyright infringement. The maximum sentence that could have been given at Newcastle Crown Court would have been 10 years. U.K. Pirate Site’s Owner Jailed for Four Years - Tech Europe. By Nick Clayton Anton Vickerman has become the first person in Britain to be jailed for running a website linking to illegal television and movie streams.
It is claimed he was making £35,000 (about $55,000) a month from his SurfTheChannel site. The site was set up in 2007 as a directory of both legitimate and illegal sources of online videos which were hosted elsewhere on the Internet. SurfTheChannel was reportedly receiving 400,000 visitors a day. The Guardian reports that he was subject of a private prosecution by the trade organization, the Federation Against Copyright Theft. Vickerman was first arrested over Surfthechannel in 2008 following an elaborate sting operation by a private investigator hired by FACT, the court heard during the trial.The private investigator posed as a prospective house buyer and filmed computer equipment in Vickerman’s home. The Guardian says that the jail sentence was welcomed by entertainment groups.