TV Links launched in October 2006, following a surge in services of its kind. At that time, it provided hyperlinks to videos on video sharing websites. On about 20 March 2007, the website was updated to use a streaming web-based video player, and direct external links were no longer made available.
On 18 October 2007, owner David Rock was arrested by the Gloucestershire police in cooperation with the Federation Against Copyright Theft and the website was shut down. Initial claims by FACT indicated the arrest was made due to offences of facilitating copyright infringement. However, it was later made clear that the arrest was over a matter of possible trademark infringement. In a statement issued by FACT following the events, local trading standards head Roger Marles implied that the website's update from hyperlinks to a streaming video player might have affected the shutdown. He stated that the arrest and shutdown were initiated because TV Links allowed users " any one of a large number of films and television programmes directly via the website. This is illegal under UK copyright law." Whilst arrested under Section 92 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, he was released pending further investigation with no charges filed against him. Section 92 has been used to prosecute illegal copiers of CDs and DVDs but never in the absence of a physical storage medium. It is unclear whether or not the operation of TV Links was a crime under UK law. In an interview, Rock stated that he would have not started the website if he had found anything in the laws of the country stating that what he was doing was illegal.
Operation
Video content used by the website was hosted by third-party video sharing websites. TV Links used hyperlinks and later a streaming web-based video player, in order to link visitors to videos. The website had a forum community with a membership of approximately 37,000 members at the time of closure. Links to videos were posted daily on the forums by members and later moved to the website listings by admins. After the video player was introduced, the website's crew enforced a strict policy against saving the provided video content and viewing it outside the scope of its video player. This policy was further enforced by a technical implementation, the URL that directed the video player to video files contained a randomly generatedMD5 encoded string and was made to expire after several minutes, or after being loaded once.
Legal efforts
The website's servers were purposely located in the Netherlands so that UK copyright law could not apply to them. As part of the effort to protect the website against legal action, a link to the following legal disclaimer was displayed at the bottom of most pages.
Reception
Eva Wiseman of The Guardian had described the practices of linking to copyrighted content as "teetering on the edge of illegality" in an article on similar video directory services. On the other hand, it was speculated that concerns over the popularity of websites such as TV Links were an influence on the launch of official online video on demand services from the UK's terrestrial television networks such as BBC iPlayer and 4od.
