... having people extradited around the world for copyright violations? Apart from the insanity of the extreme measure, what is the end goal? So that the world will hate us more? Everyone with at least half a brain knows that law passing will not stop pirating - because it hasn't done so so far. The content industry is quickly moving towards passing Islamic type laws, where peoples' hands are chopped off for stealing apples. The thing is that these guys are too stupid to realize that you craft laws and build business models around peoples' natural behaviors - not pass laws to alter peoples' behaviors to unnatural ones, which are to your liking. The content industry's crusade to stop pirating, is as likely to work, as Prohibition's past attempt to stop drinking. It's is not going to work, will turn more and more people into law breakers, and will likely invite serious criminal elements into content pirating - leading to a large black market.
Of course Big Content will not hear this. Nothing can shake old Ahab from his focus on his white whale. Things are gearing up to be one big mess. .
Update: changed 'extraditing people' to 'having people extradited'
British student Richard O’Dwyer, who created the TV-Shack website, will be extradited to the United States to face copyright infringement allegations, a UK court ruled today.
The 23-year-old student set up and ran the aggregator website, which offered links to unlicensed streams of television programmes and films that were available elsewhere on the web.
O’Dwyer faces five years in a U.S. prison should he be convicted. An appeal is expected to be lodged. The UK’s home secretary would make the final decision as to whether the student is extradited.
The British citizen set up a server thought to be in Sweden, and the domain name belongs to the Keeling Islands in Australian territory. There is no obvious connection to the United States.
But lawyers representing the U.S. government claimed that the victims in this case, the film and television studios, are based in the United States and that “access to the website took place in the U.S.”
This case sets a dangerous precedent that others can be extradited to the United States, or other countries, even if a crime had not been committed there.
It also poses a problem for sites that include or offer links to copyrighted material. Google falls within this scope, as does Bing, or any other search engine for that matter.
According to the U.S. authorities, O’Dwyer received more than $230,000 in advertising revenue since January 2008. But when one objectively looks at this site, though its purpose was to provide access to copyrighted content, a stark comparison can be made between any other search engine.
While Google and Bing and others are seemingly neutral in their search results, and do not seek to promote infringing copyright, they nevertheless provide links to illegally downloadable content.
ZDNet’s Stephen Chapman explained this last year concerning how many U.S. universities are falling foul of copyright laws, by allowing their web servers to contain copyrighted material. A few simple queries can show how easy it is to search Google for specific filetypes and names of movies, music content, software.
Google was criticised for removing torrent sites from its predictive search, but still displays a link to such sites including The Pirate Bay when the term is entered.
In theory, should a British citizen tweet a link to a a torrent of a copyrighted film or television programme, for example, under this case they could also face extradition.
O’Dwyer’s lawyer Ben Cooper said that his client would effectively become a “guinea pig” for copyright infringement laws in the U.S., as the student is the first British citizen to be extradited for such an offence.
Under British law, the site is not illegal. A UK court last year dismissed a case in which TV-Links, a similar link-aggregating site, was ruled to not have committed any offence. The site was deemed to be “no different to Google or Yahoo”.
Image credit: CrunchBase.
Related:
- Student faces U.S. extradition over ‘pirate-TV link’ website
- British ISP told to block Pirate Bay torrent site, or face court
- Lobbyists ‘held closed-door meetings’ with UK government to censor Web
- iGeneration: Why young people pirate (Pssst: It’s not just about money)
- SEO Whistleblower: Porn, piracy, and personal data: Universities providing more than just education
