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

I'm not familiar with the case

[koan]

But I personally wouldn't be travelling to "finalize a deal" in a foreign country, no you can just mail me the paper work.

Re:I'm not familiar with the case

[slashmydots]

But they also offered him a cookie bouquet, an iTunes gift card, and comp'ed the buffet if he stops in the US for just a liiiiittle bit, lol.

Re:I'm not familiar with the case

[crazyjj]

But they invited him to a party! Everyone loves a party.

Re:I'm not familiar with the case

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

He isn't the one traveling:

> Different articles are reporting that his mother is the one traveling to the U.S. to finalize the deal.

She is better equipped to handle "backroom negotiations" than he is.

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.

Re:Insanity

[jesseck]

A few problems with your post:

• TVShack hosted links. See here for more information. All TVShack did was create a one-stop source for links to content, and that is what pissed off Hollywood / the US.

• Hollywood doesn't spend all their money making shows, and shouldn't kill people for it.

• Anyone can "rip off" (AKA "fork") Libre Office and sell it for cash- they just need to make the source code of the fork available. That's part of the freedom of the LGPL.

I think part of the problem here is you know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to make an informed decision- just like the type of people in Goverment / Hollywood who start this crap. If TVShack hosted content, then prosecute. If not, then pass a law against linking to copyrighted content and prosecute if TVShack is still in business at that time.

Re:Insanity

[Xest]

Except he hasn't done anything wrong under UK law. The police and music industry already tried that in the OiNK case and lost their case with the site owner walking free having been found not guilty of the fraud laws they tried to frame him with over it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/8461879.stm

Re:Insanity

[silentcoder]

>I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself
He wasn't. It's in the fucking article. He didn't even submit the links himself ! He merely provided a forum where users could submit links.

>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.
Really ? You're aware that most people don't pay to watch your TV shows on TV right ? Advertisers pay. If somebody misses an episode and downloads it, how the hell did the studio lose any money ? The show was still aired, still showed ads and the advertisers still paid the network - who ALREADY paid you for the show !
You may have half a point when it comes to movies but for TV-shows your argument falls flat on it's arse. At best you could argue that maybe some of the people watching it online would have bought your DVD release later - but guess what, only hardcore fans of shows buy DVD releases to begin with (usually to re-watch) so that's a fairly small percentage of the income anyway.

>Stealing content is stealing content and making money on someone else's work is wrong.
You cannot "steal" content, copyright law is not property law. You can violate the monopoly granted to somebody under it. There's a huge difference.

> If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash and violating the GPL
Those two things don't go together - you can sell Libre Office for cash, people DO that all the time, and you can do so without violating the GPL. Of course we'd be up in arms if you violated the GPL but none of us would call it "stealing" and RMS (the guy who WROTE the GPL) is on record as saying that if software didn't HAVE copyright there wouldn't be any NEED for the GPL. The GPL does NOT support copyright. It deliberately subverts it, the fact that it uses the same copyright law to subvert it is just cleverness, not an endorsement.

>There is no difference
No, there isn't - but most of us GPL supporters believe there SHOULD be. What the GPL covers, we believe would be better of without copyright, or at least short-term copyright with a requirement for source-disclosure. Changing the law against such powerful foes is difficult. The GPL is a stop-gap intended to destroy their business model - when there is enough free software, nobody will be able to sell non-free software - and the outcome is the same as if the law didn't allow it (but without legal coercion - we achieve freedom using simple market forces).

But since you can't tell the difference between felony theft and civil copyright-infringement I don't expect you to understand a word I wrote, I'm merely correcting your false facts for the sake of other readers.

Re:Insanity

[betterunixthanunix]

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

You are fairly incorrect then; he hosted links.

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

Then you are a psychopath.

The fact that Hollywood companies are rich, greedy assholes is irrelevant

Except when they use their wealth to buy off politicians and create a situation where the US government tries to use an extradition treaty over a website with links to other websites that supposedly infringed on copyrights (whether or not a particular use of a copyrighted work is actually copyright infringement needs to be decided in court; only judges can decide if the fair use doctrine applies, even if the entire work was copied, and even if it seems "obvious" that it was no fair use).

Stealing content

Nothing was stolen. Hollywood had as much access to and benefit from their movies and TV shows before TVShack as they did afterwards.

making money on someone else's work is wrong

Oh, is it now? Let's get the assholes who are doing it then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash

That person would be entirely within their rights, as the GPL allows the sale or commercial use of covered works. In fact, there is a multi-billion dollar software company that routinely sells LibreOffice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat,_Inc.

There is no difference.

Sure there is: the GPL allows people to sell copies covered works without having to ask permission, so nobody will face extradition over doing so. Hollywood thinks that every time you copy a movie, you are committing copyright infringement, regardless of whether or not that has been settled in court, and has been trying to hijack the government to keep their business in the black (while simultaneously claiming they are losing money). That is the difference. This is not about the legality of hosting links to possibly illegal videos, it is about the hijacking of a major world power's government.

Re:Insanity

[betterunixthanunix]

He was definitely morally guilty as he's a chancer who thought he could make a bundle of cash by skirting the law

Not all laws are rooted in morality. Copyright, for example, is not a moral imperative; it was created to promote a particular industry's financial interests, and it has always been about promoting industry interests.

He made money with advertising by hosting links to pirated content, where he provided facilities for the people with the pirated content to provide and update the links, and took a more custodial role than a simple hands off search engine

So what you are saying is that he created a system where anyone who was hosting video files could advertise their videos? Maybe the MPAA should have made use of this system, since it sounds like it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper than their current advertising strategy.

He shouldn't be extradited, but he should be charged in the uk, and fined sufficiently that he hasn't made a profit out of this venture

So he had a good idea that might threaten the financial interests of the movie industry; your solution is to drive him out of business?

Re:Insanity

[Xest]

Well of course it doesn't make fraud legal, it does however mean that what he was doing - running a website with links to copyright infringing material, even if making money from it - was deemed not to be the crime of fraud under the circumstances of the case.

There was another similar case where a guy was found guilty but it was largely because he made it a professional enterprise actually forming a company out of it making it a genuinely criminal case.

O'Dwyer's case is identical to the first case.

Re:Insanity

[Sique]

You can't steal rights, you can just infringe upon them.

Re:Insanity

[tehcyder]

Copyright, for example, is not a moral imperative; it was created to promote a particular industry's financial interests, and it has always been about promoting industry interests.

No, in the UK at least it was created to provide artists like Dickens with a way of earning money from their creations. Obviously, places like the US ignored our copyright laws, which makes the current RIAA/MAFIAA hysteria somewhat ironic, as the US economy was basically built on infringement of intellectual property laws.

ahhh!

[slashmydots]

It's a trap! Don't do it!

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.

A modicum of context

[BertieBaggio]

Looks like Jimbo going to bat for him generated a bit of bad press.

Not being intimately familiar with the story, I wondered who the 'Jimbo' in the summary was. I should have guessed it was he of the 'please give Wikipedia money' banners, Jimmy Wales. In fairness, there have been a couple of stories on /. about it, and it is in one of TFAs; but some context in the summary from the editors or submitter would have been nice. While I'm at it, The Guardian has some coverage too.

Here ends the obligatory grousing about the article summary.

This is a way of keeping him inactive

[concealment]

As it was explained to me, deferred prosecution is like a pro-active parole. They don't bring you to trial, but if you do anything illegal and they catch you within the period of the deferment, they bring the old charges back with both barrels.

This is a crafty way of neutralizing an activist. You keep them out of the media circus of a trial, but then you've got a sword of Damocles to hold over their heads. If they continue their activism, they face old and new charges. If they do not continue, they become irrelevant and end up working in some back room, coding websites for dubious startups.

Re:This is a way of keeping him inactive

[Xest]

He should've just called their bluff. America wouldn't have got him over this. Public outcry was enough about the McKinnon case, but this guy hadn't actually done anything illegal under UK law so the noise would've only got strong regarding this.

There is already a massive amount of pressure to reform our extradition agreement with the US as is, the US has done this in the hope that avoiding another embarassing turn-around by our government in deciding not to extradite because it would be politically impossible to do so due to the uproar which would've been the final nail in the coffin for what is an already struggling extradition treaty.

I hope this means America is finally realising that if they want to retain an extradition treaty with the UK where they feel it matters, i.e. with terrorism suspects - in other words, what the treaty was generally intended for - then they need to stop abusing it for, and taking the piss with other things.

This is their way of saving face, and simultaneously hoping they don't lose a valuable tool. It's a shame he didn't call their bluff though and become the guy who forced the final nail into the coffin for the extradition treaty, though I do sympathise with him making the decision he has - I imagine it's tough to be willing to put your life on the line for the greater good when your opponent is the most powerful nation and government in the world.

Re:Offtopic rant - "Another Random User"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a registered user, not an anonymous reader. another random user (2645241)

DO NOT TRUST!

[serviscope_minor]

Seriously DO NOT TRUST THIS!

Why can't this simply be carried out at the US embassy in London?

Why do they want him to be physically present in the USA?

Also, this is the most disgusting use of the extradition "agreement" so far, much more so than the McKinnon case. The reason being is that what he did isn't even a crime in the UK. Well, perhas/probably not. The CPS decided not to bring a case because noone is sure. Apparently a "test case" is needed.

So apparently here not only do yu have to know the local law in more detail than even the government, you also have to know that even if you're not comitting a crime here you also have to know all the USA laws too just in case the government decides to hang you out to dry and try to extradite you for a crime that doesn't even exist!

At what point does ignorance of laws of a country you've never visited and never dones business in become a valid excuse?

At least this madness is possibly over.

But I certainly would not trust the USA authorities if I was him. If he can pay, then he can mail a cheque to the embassy. Anything else is way beyond the boundaries of trust.

Re:DO NOT TRUST!

[VAElynx]

As my friend said, we should attempt extraditing a large, random sample of US population on possession of handgun charges (Illegal under UK law.)

Taxpayer here...

[fuzzybunny]

...can someone please remind me how much of my money is being wasted on this shit?

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.