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Share Links, Become Extradited To the US

Posted by Soulskill on from the idle-mice-are-the-devil's-playthings dept.

castrox writes with an in-depth followup to a story we discussed in June: "Sharing links online, particularly links to copyrighted material, may render you extradited to the United States of America. 'In May, American law enforcement officials opened up yet another front in this war by seeking the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer. The 23-year-old British college student is currently working on his BS in interactive media and animation. Until last year, he ran a "link site" that helped users find free movies and TV shows, many of them infringing. American officials want to try him on charges of criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy.' The case is unique because the site, which the accused Englishman ran, was not located in the US in any way. Does this set a new precedent of things to come? The agency responsible for the extradition request is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement."

6 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Tax dollars by cjcela · · Score: 5, Insightful

    More tax dollars tossed to the trash to protect the interests of a few companies. And the guy was not even posting infringing content. This is getting so out of hand. Way to go, America!

    1. Re:Tax dollars by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More tax dollars tossed to the trash to protect the interests of a few companies.

      "Intellectual property" is one of the few things that the US produces these days and it employs a large amount of people in a country rife with joblessness. While the RIAA and MPAA are disgusting organizations and there's certainly outright corruption with the industry buying politicians, I wonder if some in the government are pushing for these stringent measures because they think it will save the country.

  2. Extradition is All the Rage! by Lance+Dearnis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First Cisco trying it from Canada, now the MPAA through Britain. An important thing to note through the article is that copyright laws exist in both countries - but that so far, it seems in Britain that link-sharing alone is not as damning as it is in the US. Mainly, it looks like TVShack was much more commercialized than Hotfile, and that's always something that results in a bigger hammer coming down the line. An important thing to note as well is the previous experience British judges have had with copyright litigation - I remember ACS Law and Crossley being torn into, as seen here (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/amounts-to-blackmail-inside-a-p2p-settlement-letter-factory.ars) Really, I don't think he's getting extradited. Britain is markedly hostile to US-style copyright infringement proceedings, and I doubt they failed to figure out where Crossley got his tactics from. Unless if they get someone to play rubber stamp and not examine the case, I'd lay my money on O'Dwyer staying right where he is.

  3. jurisdiction? by green1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How does this work? if he broke the law in the UK, he should be tried in the UK. Under what grounds would extradition to the US make sense? he'd have to have committed a crime in US territory, and if the site wasn't there, and he wasn't there, then the answer to this seems pretty clear...
    If you want to try him for a crime allegedly committed in the UK, try him in the UK, not the US. And if the UK laws don't allow you to try him in the UK because what he did wasn't a crime there, then too bad for you!

    1. Re:jurisdiction? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The article said the theory of jurisdiction is that the US is claiming jurisdiction over all top-level domains based in the us, so all .com, .net, .org, etc.

  4. The moral of the story: by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ICE's contention is that the site's use of an address within the .net TLD, administered by Verisign and within US jurisdiction, was the grounds on which their jurisdiction was established.

    That seems an unnervingly broad criterion for establishing jurisdiction(if the the state tourism board of $PICTURESQE_TROPICAL_COUNTRY buys some ads from ClearChannel, urging people to book vacations, does ICE acquire jurisdiction over them?); but the immediate practical punchline seems to be to Stay. The. Fuck. Away. from American registrars if doing something that pisses off the feds.

    I can see that using an American registrar would leave you open to having your domain name(which, effectively, is a 'property' that exists in the US as much as it is anything else) being seized; but leaving you open to extradition seems insane.