The Czech Pirate Party launched “Linking is Not a Crime” campaign back in July, which was a sign of protest against a teenage being fined $7 million for simply providing links to copyrighted content. Earlier, in frames of this campaign the Czech Pirate Party had already launched 2 film download portals, where it was providing links without hosting the information itself.
The high school student in question was a 16-year-old Liberec resident. He was accused by the Czech Anti-Piracy Union for offering links to copyright content and is now demanded to pay over $7 million in damage. In response, the Pirate Party has opened another portal, called Moviehome and also referred to as “Facebook for movies”.
The head of the local Pirate Party claimed that sharing of links is actually a principle without which the web would cease to function, and that’s why they were regularly fighting against the criminalization of linking. The party also pointed out that the Czech Anti-Piracy Union had no idea what to do, as they were probably focusing on the court action with the student, hoping that they might claim all of the party’s sites are against the law. At the same time, the Union also didn’t want to give them publicity and didn’t have much to say, because really the Pirate Party’s websites were legal.
The party claimed they would support Moviehome as long as it maintains its non-commercial status, since they are a party which doesn’t want to depend on the finances from online advertising. This is the reason for all of their linking websites being strictly non-profit. However, the party believes that for others there is nothing wrong about running commercial linking sites – actually, Google has been doing so for a while now.
The party noted that they would also welcome anyone with such project who asks for their support – for example, the Pirate Party has already sent open invitations to The Pirate Bay to make use of Czech hosting in case legal matters force the BitTorrent tracker to do that.
In addition, apart from the three Czech linking websites there comes the Pirate Party Canada’s Travis McCrea’s website, which means that pirates simply decided they couldn’t lose that war. The party is sure that if the country’s court rules linking is a crime, the public uproar would get the party into parliament, because public hates to lose rights they already had, particularly when they fought hard to obtain them.
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