Slashdot Mirror
DrinkOrDie Warez Trader to be Extradited to U.S.
femto writes "Hew Raymond Griffiths, alleged to be one of the leaders of the warez group DrinkOrDie, is to be extradited to the United States after losing an appeal. The case is of interest as the appeal was based on the fact that during the offences, alleged to have been committed in the US, the accused did not leave Australia."
I'm not sure how good or relevant an analogy this would be, but I'm thinking it would be like if I, as a Canadian, hired a hitman to kill a U.S. citizen in the U.S. Although I would never have left Canada, my actions would directly influence crimes committed in the United States. Since he likely had fileservers based in the US under his control, that would justify calling it a crime based in the US. Physical location honestly doesn't seem to have a lot of relevance anymore, since a lot of crimes can be done digitally from the other side of the world, and don't require physical access.
IANAL so I don't know all the specifics of extraditions....
However, I am not sure that this is all bad in most cases. Usually extradition deals require a fair amount of dealmaking between the prosecution and the extraditing courts. Usually there is some level of protection of the rights that a person has before extradition. So if someone cannot be tried for the death penalty in the extraditing state, usually this is a condition of extradition. You can imagine what might happen if Osama Bin Ladin were to be captured in a country that has no death penalty (say the UK), the international politics that might result...
So often extradition is not the trampling on rights that people are afraid it might be.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
We get to keep our ANZUS treaty alive... which is important to alot of Aussies because we have an irrational xenophobic idea that Indonesia will try to invade us one day. (our army being outnumbered 3 to 1 by McDonalds employees and all)
The thing that is most disturbing about this is not that people can get extradited for copyright violations, it is that the US can get someone to be extradited for this, but that hell would freeze over before the US would extradite a US citizen for this kind of offense to another nation.