British Student Faces Extradition To US Over Copyright 340
An anonymous reader writes "A 23-year-old British computer student faces possible extradition to the U.S. for linking to copyrighted content on his website. The student, Richard O'Dwyer, was accused of copyright infringement after setting up the website TV Shack, which had links to thousands of films and tv shows, but did not directly host them."
Re:Land of the free - paradox? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever read "1984"? Remember how the war department was the "Ministry of Peace", the propaganda department was the "Ministry of Truth", etc.? The USA's claim "land of the free" is the same. It's just propaganda, and it never was true. At least back in the old days, it was only the slaves and Indians who weren't free, but these days it's everyone who isn't super-rich and politically connected.
Re:Jurisdiction (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm an American and I find this situation as well as almost every governmental figure from the last 8 years pathetic. Even the ones that were mostly good, like my Senator Richard Lugar, have been shit since the Newt Gingrich congress when everything officially went apeshit with partisan hate (ending in the most unnecessary impeachment trial in history). But even worse than the politicians are the general public who keep electing these idiot facemen time after time. We're in major trouble, kids!
Re:YouTube, Google, Facebook (Score:3, Interesting)
TV shack exists purely to allow people access to copyright information without the copyright holder's permission.
Re:Jurisdiction (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Jurisdiction (Score:4, Interesting)
Right, but that doesn't redress the imbalance around the fact that the treaty allows for the USA to remove people from the UK for things actions that occur in the UK but are illegal under US law.
To highlight how crazy this is, there's a case of a somone involved in a bribery scandal being extradited even though the alleged crimes occurred entirely between the UK and Nigeria, just because he worked for a firm owned by Haliburton!
Of course it's right that such crimes should be investigated, but things like that are illegal in the UK too. If our criminal justice system doesn't see fit to prosecute, why pull them out to the USA to do it?
Having said that, our police and prosecutors are clearly and obviously corrupt at the highest levels (evidenced by the fact that our Tory government employed a former newspaper editor from News International who has been implicated in a phone hacking scandal, and his former boss even accidentally admitted to parliament that her paper regularly bribes police officers for information) so maybe you're doing us a favour. This is about the principal though!
OMFG, what BS (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a blaring indictment of how corporations run things. This copyright crap is just about corporate strings controlling our government. Where is the rage?
I can remember back in the day when the Internet first started how when it was first used for making money how angry the users were against it. It was suppose to be a landscape of pure thought, ideas to be shared for the edification of us all. Bzzzt. That didn't work out. Now its been raped by corporations, if some kid puts up a website that they think they can squeeze a dime out of they burn him. What is sickening is how our pathetic lapdog piece of shit politicians hand over the keys of power to them. We then have a massive industry of enforcement and punishment. We have so many fucking people in jail now its fucking insane.
Lets dissect all these fucking laws of ours that put people in jail to protect corporate interests. Next we need to consider that our retarded crooked cunt of a Supreme Court has decided in their fucked in the head reasoning that corporations are now "people" and have rights. Holy fucking shit people! How far does a cock have to jam up our asses before we realize how raped we are? How come they aren't paying taxes like a normal person then? Oh, that is right, they buy politicians to give us a tax code that stacks taller than a person.
The one big lesson that we have collectively forgotten like a bunch of retards is this: When it happens to the least of us, it happens to all of us. When we let these fuckers in charge get away with fucking ONE OF US, then ALL of our liberties are in jeopardy. If you don't consider ANY violation of ANYONE'S liberties a violation of your OWN liberty, then you just fuck off and let it happen. They come for you eventually too, and there is nobody left to stand and fight them with you. Besides you don't deserve anyone helping you because you were a cowardly cunt who let it happen to others.
I hope the British people fucking riot over this, but they will not. They are a bunch of lemming pussies too. Who am I to talk? We are proving to be the biggest bunch of retarded pussies in history. I shit you all not, if we don't get a grasp of our government and rip it away from corporations, we will be viewed by future historians as infinitely worse than the fucktards in the era of Germany that let the Nazis rise to power.
Why get so excited over some punk kid getting treated like a high crimes criminal? Sweet Jesus, people, this could be YOU. This could be ME! I don't have the means to fight this kind of shit? Do you? How far will they keep taking control over us? Oh fuck it, what can I expect of the Facebook generation? Stop the fucking planet, I want off.
Re:How many links is the limit for infringement? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think what these arguments are missing, which is what is often missing, is the area of intent. For example, Slashdot links to all sorts of "illegal" material -- but the site is a news site, not a site that is dedicated to indexing copyright infringed works.
What this guy could have done was make his site a discussion site with TV schedules etc. that just happened to also have an area showing examples of where this content was available online. If these links were not the primary goal of the site, but only a result of other user's activity on the site (and not ad supported), he likely wouldn't be under the extradition cloud.
US courts don't really care that much about what crimes you facilitate; they care about what crimes you premeditatively facilitate. They also care if someone cries foul and appears to have a case, yet you ignore them and don't take reasonable steps to make things better.
Re:Pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
This one sounds like the US has no real interest at all in the case, they are just trying to lower the bar for extradition cases, with the aim of targeting other people. This guy is just seems to be a victim of a political game, with the intention of making it easier to extradite other people currently in the UK for the crime of handling intellectual property that the US does not want them to.
So will the British government and the British people just role over and become another third world country when it comes to providing the citizens justice against politically motivated chargers by the US government.