Anton Vickerman, owner of Surfthechannel.com, reportedly made £35,000 a month through the web site, which attracted around 400,000 visitors per day.
According to the BBC, the 38-year-old was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud for ‘facilitating’ copyright infringement. The website did not host the videos itself, but instead encouraged users to submit links to both legal and illegal content.

Sting operation

Vickerman was arrested following a sting operation by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), where a private investigator was hired to take photographs of Vickerman’s computer equipment while pretending to be interested in his property in 2008.
Fact’s general director, Kieron Sharp, welcomed the conviction. He said: ‘Mr Vickerman knew what he was doing from the outset, having been involved in the pirate community for some time. This was not a passive search engine. Surfthechannel was created specifically to make money from criminal activity and it became the biggest site of its kind on the internet within two years.’
According to The Guardian newspaper, David Walbank, for the defence, told Newcastle crown court that Mr Vickerman was now financially ruined and would likely be declared bankrupt.
Loz Kaye of the UK Pirate Party – a copyright and patent reform campaigning body -- said that the sentence was ‘inappropriate’, adding: ‘The way this issue was investigated, prosecuted and the resulting sentence are deeply concerning. A four-year prison sentence is twice the maximum that could have been handed down if Mr Vickers had been charged with on-line copyright infringement.’

Take-down requests

Meanwhile, Californian search engine giant Google has come under criticism for cracking down on copyright infringing web sites while admitting that Google-owned YouTube – which hosts massive amounts of pirated material – will be unlikely to be affected.
According to US-based broadcaster CNN, a new campaign will see Google adjust its search rankings to demote web sites that receive ‘take-down’ requests from copyright holders. However, YouTube – the subject of numerous take-down requests – is expected to emerge unscathed, as millions of users rely on the site for completely legal reasons.
‘It's not because we're hand-picking anything,’ a Google spokesman said. ‘Generally speaking, we're about promoting what's relevant to our users.’