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Alleged KickassTorrents Owner Considers 'Voluntary Surrender' To the US (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Earlier this year a Polish court ruled that Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of the defunct torrent site KickassTorrents, can be extradited to the United States. The decision came as a disappointment to the defense team, which quickly announced an appeal. Vaulin has since been released on bail and currently resides in a Warsaw apartment. His release has made it easier to communicate with his attorneys in the United States, who have started negotiations with the U.S. Government. While the extradition appeal is still ongoing, it now appears that under the right conditions Vaulin might consider traveling to the United States voluntarily, so he can "resolve" the pending charges. This is what the defense team states in a motion for a status conference (pdf), which was submitted earlier this week.
They think they can make their law apply worldwide and bully countries to give up citizens because they infringes some law in the US.
Imagine if insulting the president was against the law, similar to the lese majeste law in Thailand and other backward countries like it, would countries around the world let themselves be bullied by the US to give up hundreds of citizens for that as well?
He lives in a country that has been partitioned, invaded, and raped blind by every one of its neighbors over the past 250 years or so.
Its only reliable ally is the United States.
If you were going to run a torrent site, I would have recommended living pretty much anywhere but Poland.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I still don't understand the legal theory that says that foreign citizens operating entirely outside of the US can be held accountable to US law.
We have seen this with gambling sites, file sharing sites, etc. I get applying US law if a foreign national defrauds a US citizen from their hideout in another country. Or going after the leadership of criminal conspiracies that operate inside the US but have their top people overseas - a buddy of mine investigates medical fraud cases that are run by an organized crime ring in Cuba of all places.
But this is different. A web site that hosts links to files hosted elsewhere and is itself hosted in another country by people who are subject to the laws of other nations? Can China come after the editors and owners of Slashdot for its users violating Chinese speech laws? They seem to take those more seriously than the US takes copyright law.
This whole thing is nuts. Or maybe I'm missing something.