TVShack Founder Signs Deal Avoiding Extradition

another random user writes with news that the founder of TVShack probably won't be thrown into a U.S. prison for life. From the article: "Richard O'Dwyer, from Sheffield, is accused of breaking copyright laws. The US authorities claimed the 24-year-old's TVShack website hosted links to pirated films and TV programs. The High Court was told Mr O'Dwyer had signed a 'deferred prosecution' agreement which would require him paying a small sum of compensation. Mr O'Dwyer will travel to the US voluntarily in the next few weeks for the deal to be formally ratified, it is understood." Looks like Jimbo going to bat for him generated a bit of bad press. As usual, the MPAA is not enthused. Different articles are reporting that his mother is the one traveling to the U.S. to finalize the deal.

Comments

Insanity

[betterunixthanunix]

This is how we know that our copyright system is completely out of control. Extradition over links?

Re:Insanity

[kh31d4r]

I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself. If I spent all my money to make an expensive show and then someone ripped it off and started streaming it for free and stealing my viewers and making money off my work that they paid nothing for, I'd fucking kill them. The fact that Hollywood companies are rich, greedy assholes is irrelevant. Stealing content is stealing content and making money on someone else's work is wrong. If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash and violating the GPL, everyone on slashdot would be going apeshit over it. There is no difference.

Sigh. If he stole it, they wouldn't have it anymore.

Re:Insanity

[Xest]

"I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself."

You can be as fairly certain as you want, but you'd still be completely and utterly wrong.

"If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash and violating the GPL, everyone on slashdot would be going apeshit over it."

Except the GPL allows you to do exactly that providing you also offer the source code for binaries, so no, I doubt they would be going apeshit over it, unless, like you, they knew not what the fuck they were on about. See here:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney

As the rest of your post is based on your false starting assumptions it is all equally wrong.

You'd have to be fool to go to the US

[nedlohs]

Send a representative who isn't going to get arrested at the airport.

Who the hell is Jimbo? (answer within)

[wonkey_monkey]

The "Jimbo" in the summary is Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. I usually get shouted down for suggesting that summaries could do with a bit more context on occasion, but this is ridiculous.