Attracting over 400,000 users a day, Surfthechannel and was more popular than Facebook - at its peak.
An internet pirate who banked up to £60,000 a month from a site which shared links to downloadable TV shows and films was jailed for four years today. Anton Vickerman’s surfthechannel.com website attracted 400,000 visitors a day at its peak and was close to the top 500 most popular websites. Vickerman 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.
It was revealed that surfthechannel.com allowed access to more than 5,600 films and TV shows and experts have estimated the damages to be between £52m and £198m depending on different ways of calculating lost sales.
Source: The Independent , The Guardian, Dailymail
