The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has sued Pullmylink.com, a website featuring links to free - and allegedly pirated - movies and TV shows, claiming the site promotes and profits from copyright infringement. The lawsuit is the seventh action filed by the MPAA against content aggregators in the US since late last year and is part of a larger anti-piracy campaign that included a criminal raid on the UK headquarters of the website TV Links. The campaign against sites that link to, but do not host, illegal content has raised some eyebrows with critics asking why the association doesn"t go after the host sites or search engines such as Google, which owns video sharing site YouTube. "...Is the message that it"s less criminal to host illegal content on YouTube than it is to link to it from a site such as TV Links?..." Guardian technology columnist Jack Schofield wrote in the wake of the MPAA-directed raid on TV Links in October.
In future, do I risk being thrown in the slammer for linking directly to a YouTube video?