Anton Vickerman's Case Study
Just a few facts...
- Earned about $35,000 per month in advertising revenue
- Provided legal and illegal downloads of copyrighted material
- Eg. films, TV shows
Case study
- Anton Vickerman was the owner of surfthechannel.com
- He never really hosted the copyrighted content, and only shared links with interested people that were looking for free downloads of films and TV shows. This got him jailed for 4 years as he was obtaining revenue from the ads in his site by sharing the links
- This case was seen as being unnecessarily harsh (Vickerman claimed that his surfthechannel.com only displayed videos from other video-hosting websites such as Youtube, and did not show any pirated content
- Is this really justified? Anton Vickerman never engaged in acts of Internet Piracy, and only shared links to the website. He never uploaded nor downloaded any illegal material, only gave people directions where to download films and TV shows for free. Imagine - You could get thrown into jail for sharing a YouTube link of a official music video.