A few days ago, it became known that the Czech Pirate Party is being prosecuted for running an illegal TV show website. Now it faces 200,000 euros in damages and could even be dissolved as a legal entity. However, its chief believes that defending Internet hyperlinking is worth the huge trouble.

Apparently, the Pirate Party is ready to make big sacrifices to defend citizens’ rights to communicate freely on the Internet: both Swedish and British branches of the Party have been supporting The Pirate Bay and are still out there. But the Czech Pirate Party went much further by independently and intentionally founding and running a TV piracy website Sledujuserialy.cz in order to provoke a conflict with the law.

The Pirate Party explained that the former owners of the service were threatened by Czech Anti-Piracy Union in January 2013 and agreed to transfer control to the Party, which didn’t mind fighting with the agency. It took the Czech pirates 2 years to get an official notification that their party will be prosecuted in criminal court for running the illegal service. In response, the Party points out that the site carried no copyrighted content itself but merely linked to it via embedded links. The original intention of the Party was to create a precedent that could clearly confirm that a link is not a crime. The representatives of the Pirate Party explained that the local Anti-Piracy Union mainly targeted physical persons until now, but those often had no money to pay lawyers and had to settle. Now the Party is going to publicly show that the Anti-Piracy Union’s legal position is not strong enough to continue doing so.

The Pirate Party also explained that while the site’s domain was registered to the party, the identity of its operators is being protected to prevent the Anti-Piracy Union from targeting individuals. Nevertheless, some industry experts believe that the Party’s actions could have serious consequences – for example, it runs the risk of being ordered to pay about 200 thousand EUR in damages and be dissolved as a legal entity. As for the Party, it feels entirely justified in the position it has taken and stands by its decision to defend the hyperlink.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.