Home Office To Ignore Wikipedia Founder's Petition Against O'Dwyer Extradition

An anonymous reader writes "The Home Office has confirmed home secretary Theresa May will not block TVShack founder Richard O'Dwyer's U.S. extradition, despite widespread calls for her to do so." It would appear the fate of the tvshack founder is now sealed.

Comments

Time and Place

[Dan B.]

So if you do something that is not a crime in your own country, but is in another, yet you never set foot in that country, you can now be extradited? Wouldn't that fall under persecution grounds for asylum? Maybe I should check with the Equadorian Embassy...

Re:Time and Place

[kraut]

> Only so long as the country the alleged crime was committed in is the USA.

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:Time and Place

[L4t3r4lu5]

If I fire a gun from the England border into Scotland and kill someone, you can bet I'll be extradited to Scotland to stand trial for murder.

Re:Time and Place

[cheekyjohnson]

Exactly. These people are supposedly guilty of the heinous crime of... copying! Totally worth extraditing someone over, and why not waste taxpayer money doing so? It's not our money!

Re:Time and Place

[Sique]

But only because murder is illegal in England too.

Re:Time and Place

[tehcyder]

If I fire a gun from the England border into Scotland and kill someone, you can bet I'll be extradited to Scotland to stand trial for murder.

Isn't the slight difference that murder is a crime in both countries, whereas copyright infringement isn't?

I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being extradited for a civil matter before, although no doubt someone can prove me wrong.

I have zero personal sympathy for this guy. I read an interview recently in which he said he had spent the GBP140K he had earned from his website on "normal student things" like going to the cinema and buying pizza. Which is such a load of bollocks it's a joke..

However, he certainly shouldn't be extradited for this. If this had been the other way round, there is no way he would have been extradited from the US to the UK even if he had committed a real, serious crime.

Re:Time and Place

[Pseudonym]

Interestingly, there have been test cases to this effect in Commonwealth countries. There was a famous test case to this effect in Australia, where someone fired a gun on one side of a state border (much of the decision was to decide precisely where the border was) and killed a person who was on the other side.

The murder, it was ruled, happened in the state where the victim was shot.

Re:Time and Place

[Dan541]

Wait until countries like Pakistan and Iran get in on this. All western women will need to be deported for stoning.

Re:Time and Place

[wild_quinine]

Here are the important facts.

1) O'Dwyer never went to the US whilst running the site. He visited as a small child, but I don't think he has a stronger connection to the US than this.

2) The servers on which his service were being run were not in the US.

Most sensible people would therefore argue that he hasn't comitted a crime on US soil.

But it gets worse. The existing case law in the UK suggests very strongly that the UK does not consider what O'Dwyer did to be a crime. A similar site (TV links) was accused in similar circumstances and let off the hook, because it was deemed to be a 'mere conduit' (Like a safe harbour defense, rather than that deciding that *linking to things is not a crime*, for example).

Now a UK judge has said that O'Dwyer probably was criminal in this case, because he exerted considerable control over the site, and therefore cannot use the same defense.

But that's smoke and mirrors, frankly. The way we figure out if that is a crime or not is to try him in court, not to push him off to some corrupt nation where it definitely is a crime.

The War on Youth

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, one more small battle in the War on Youth. Let's see: cameras in the streets, ASBOs, patents that kill new competition, laws against drugs, laws against sharing, laws against resisting arrest, student loans, sugar-laden foods, credit card debt, loss of permanent jobs, the list goes on. The UK and USA lead the world in the War on Youth, which pits the old against the young. Extraditing a couple of "pirates" is just consistent with this theme.

Re:The War on Youth

[progician]

Strange thing, but there's truth in this. In an other discussion I was wondering that the current trend in demographics in relation to electorate politics creates a political system that is by nature becomes the enemy of the younger generations, and that is easy to show all over Western Europe. Most of the politicians and the people who vote for them were educated on the expense of the budget, that is, "for free". This generation benefited of the welfare state in every way, health case, job protection, rent control, council housing, cheap mortgage and property prices, so they could cut these services with the line "there ain't such thing as free lunch".

Ageing population is a real political concern for the under-thirties generation.

Re:The War on Youth

[khallow]

Funny how so many social benefits lead to this sort of generational warfare. Education clearly helps the young more while medical care and pensions (especially of the sort that can't be sustained with changing demographics). This is one of the reasons I advocate getting government (well, my government, yours can keeping doing whatever it's doing) out of the entitlement racket.

Among other things, it stirs rivalry between different segments of the population, young versus old, poor versus wealthy, politically marginalized versus the politically connected, uncredentialed versus the credentialed, etc. How are you going to get society-wide cooperation when so many groups are fighting for their piece of government squeeze?

Swap Richard for Bob Diamond

[Anonymous Coward]

Bet they don't extradite Bob Diamond for overseeing the fraud of vast amounts of money that may actually have done real damage to US citizens, never mind the UK and the rest of the world.

Re:Conservative party Minister: so pro USA

[Anonymous Coward]

In America you have the the Republicans, who are the equivalent of our Conservative party, and the Democrats, who are the equivalent of our Conservative party....

Absurd

[xenobyte]

If a UK citizen can be extradited to the US for breaking US law outside the US while physically never setting foot on US soil, why don't we see people getting extradited to all sorts of countries for breaking their laws while sitting in our homes in our own countries?

Second, extradition is for serious crimes only. Why wasn't the request squashed as it's only related to a civil matter of copyright infringement, not a criminal offense?

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, that brings up a thought - why can't Greece extradite Jamie Dimon & Lloyd Blankfein to Greece for their "crimes" at defrauding the country into massive debt? After all, if the US can extradite someone for something as "horrible" as posting *links* to *other sites* that contain copyrighted material, *surely* outright financial fraud ought to be extraditable. :-)

Re:Conservative party Minister: so pro USA

[Sique]

So the UK will extradite car driving women to Saudi Arabia, where it's illegal for women to drive, for better oil purchase conditions too?

Re:Conservative party Minister: so pro USA

[A beautiful mind]

Absolutely. The UK sent people to Libya while Gaddafi was still in power in exchange for lucrative business opportunities.

Scary

[Coisiche]

As Dr. Ben Goldacre has just tweeted, "it's the little things like extradition at the behest of a corporation that make you worry the whole world is corrupt".

I think that ship may have sailed.

I admit, I was wrong !

[Taco Cowboy]

First, it was the case of Assange, and now this

The whole thing reads like as if the government of the United Kingdom has lowered itself to the level of being a servant of Uncle Sam

I always thought that, Great Britain, ...

- a place which gave birth to the charter of Magna Carta,

- a place where the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of round table

- a place where the Bard (William Shakespeare) produced his world famous plays
 
... would be proud of itself
 
... would take its own national sovereignty very seriously
 
... would never kow tow to anyone, for any reason ...

After witnessing what transpired in both cases, I have to admit, that I was wrong
 

Re:I admit, I was wrong !

[CrackedButter]

Nobody in our government gives a shit. They are a bunch of cunts.

Re:I admit, I was wrong !

[The Askylist]

It was the last lot that signed the extradition agreement in the first place. Why we are extraditing someone for "copyright" offences, which should really be a civil matter, is beyond me. I would have thought that the correct course of action would be for the copyright holders to bring a case for damages in the UK courts and take their chances. This lot, the last lot? They're all cunts by definition. An honest politician is all too rare a commodity these days - the web of intertwined lobbying interests seems to strangle truth at birth.

Re:The ISPs were facilitating copying.

[hairyfeet]

I would say YES because while i haven't gone to TVShack i have gone to others to see shows i have already paid for by paying for cable TV but simply missed because of one thing or another. I mean why the hell should i shell out money to build a fricking DVR or add extra drives so my PC can do it when i can just use the net to find a show i missed and watch it whenever?

and I thought the whole point of the Betamax ruling was if something had a non infringing use even if others used it differently it couldn't just be banned outright? or did the cartels get that one tossed when i wasn't looking?

Re:Wikipedia Founder

[haruchai]

England never listens to Wales.

This story is false

[jwales]

Theresa May has not said "NO" and indeed has not responded at all. The report quotes a press release that was issued before my petition was even launched. There has been no response to me at all so far.

Every signature counts as they are clearly feeling the pressure.

Jimmy Wales