Cease extradition of Mother's young son to USA. 'The Fight of Her Life' Julia O'Dwyer, Richard O'Dwyer.r

[Vesta2]

Fellow Mum's please could you support this mother in her campaign to cease extradition of her young son to the USA. Please visit her blog juliasblog-the-fight-of-our-lives.blogspot.com/og. Thankyou

[thebestisyettocome]

I think it's pretty obvious that involving yourself in piracy activities could lead to you to have committed offences in other jurisdictions. Trying to draw comparisions with varying ages of consent and educating women is pretty tenuous.

[ThatVikRinA22]

thats not actually correct Wannabe, its called copyright law
see section 7 restricted acts

if you copy a work belonging to another without paying for it you have broken the law.

[wannaBe]

but he can't be tried in the UK vesta because the crime he committed is not a crime in the UK. But because of the fact the internet does not have those same boundaries he was able to commit a crime in the US even though he wasn't on their soil at the time.

If you committed a crime while in another country no-one would surely argue that you should be tried in the UK would they? this is IMO no different.

Fwiw it's the same with Gary McKinnon - he hacked into the pentagon - he has therefore violated a US law and is accountable in the US.

[ThatVikRinA22]

dont even get me started on Gary Mckinnon - i researched that one extensively due to DS having aspergers.

[ThatVikRinA22]

hiding thread now before i get embroiled in a bun fight, i respect that everyone has the right to their own opinion, but do please research the facts.

[Vesta2]

sorry to see you go vicarina :(

[Vesta2]

wannabe, then that brings me back to the case of Sarah Ferguson, she committed an offense in Turkey and Turkey have requested extradition but according to Reuters uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/13/uk-turkey-ferguson-orphanage-idUKTRE80C0Q120120113 the Home Office are not complying on the grounds that what she did is not illegal in the UK. I agree with this and believe the same should be applied to Richard O'Dwyer.

[ThatVikRinA22]

im still here, but need to take a break from this thread - the Gary Mckinnon case upsets me and touches a nerve. I know how aspies think, or dont think as the case may be. He is a lamb to the slaughter.

so i will take a break from this thread now, because while i like buns, i dont like wasting them by chucking them at people.

good luck Vesta.

[kelly2000]

www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/jun/17/student-file-sharing-tvshack-extradition

Short article about it. He certainly should be prosecuted, but his crime was in Europe (although the victims were in America), so there is a good arguement for his being tried here. However under private international law there are grounds for prosecuting people in the country of the victims, it depends on where the case has stronger links, not the defendent I believe.

If you think about it if he had helped commit a murde rin america by emailing people details of who to contact to commit the crime, then he would certainly be extradited to America, so one coudl argue the same could be applied to the fact he posted links to american material online that was available in america.

[wannaBe]

I don't think the Sarah ferguson issue is that black and white tbh.

In principle, if you commit a crime in another country where the laws in that country are different to our own, then you are accountable in that country, e.g. don't bring alcohol into Saudi if you don't want to land up in jail.

But I'm not entirely sure that every crime warrants extradition, and in Sarah Ferguson's case, I think you have to look at the motives for the crime, i.e. she was highlighting the plight of children in Turkey's orphanages, and while filming them may have been illegal in Turkey, her motives were not for personal gain or benefit, her motives were directed towards the alleged victims of her "crime", who are themselves in fact victims of far greater wrongdoing, wrongdoing that might not have been exposed if the law here had been fully adhered to.

Committing a crime for personal financial gain is an entirely different matter, IMO.

[ThatVikRinA22]

link to the guardian story from kelly2000 above

[ThatVikRinA22]

taken from the guardian peice - "Some experts on digital law question whether providing links to illegal downloads rather than directly hosting them would even constitute an offence in the UK. In February last year charges involving fraud and copyright against a similar site, TV-Links, were dismissed after a judge ruled that linking alone was not illegal"

surely this inconsistency needs to be addressed?

[ThatVikRinA22]

another guardian piece on why the treaty that allows extradition of UK nationals is unfair and lopsided

interesting reading.

[Hajdeby]

Just saw this thread and thought someones young child was being taken away. PMSL when I realised that he is the same age I was when I got married!

Anyway, his illegal activities netted him over £100K, sounds like he has been a very naughty boy to me!

[ThatVikRinA22]

i dont think anyone is saying that this lad shouldnt go on trail - just that he should not be extradited to the US and should be tried here.

There are bigger issues than just this one case - i linked a piece on the whole treaty in my last post (before this one) and it is very unfair.

[thebestisyettocome]

I am not entirely convinced by the article Vicar linked. Apart from it being really badly written I think it fails to deal with the substantive points made in the original piece.

Nobody on this thread has convinced me that it's ok to prevent the music, television and film industries from being paid the royalties that are rightfully theirs. Piracy means real job losses for real people and I for one actually give a shit about that. Reduced revenues also have a knock on effect in terms of the output; record labels and television and film prodcution companies are less and less inclined to take risks. I think it would be a shame if the only things ever made for our consumption was populist bollocks music, tv and film that would provide enough income to counterbalance the losses incurred by piracy.

If we in the UK are too slow in policing piracy we can hardly blame the US authorities for that. I said earlier that given the nature of the internet, even I would realise that I was risking offending in other jursidications if I took part in these sorts of activities. Presumably this 'young' boy knew that some of his substantial income was generated from the US at the time of his trading activity?

[gerty5]

if you go to any browser, say, google, and type in free film, pages and pages will come up of free downloads.
So google 'links' to pirate stuff. goolgle didn't pirate the films.
I like google, I like it's non-censoring of peoples choice, anyone is free to make a web-page, who hasn't got a facebook?
What's the difference between google and this lad?
I think other posters said he made money from the adverts, because I get the feeling posters mind more about the money, it's all very strange,
why does the USA want to extradite this lad but google continues?
I can hear posters saying its because he broke the law, but his offense, if there is one is that there were links, same as google, and whatever money he made was from adverts, same as google, I don't want google to go, and they earn billions, and I don't want this lad to go, it just doesn't make any sense.

[ThatVikRinA22]

thats my point gerty - i did the same a few pages back - i googled and got directed to loads of pirate sites...
but google isnt a person and i think people dont like it when a person profits - its fine it its a multibillion pound company though....

if he is to be tried - it should be here. and so should everyone else who has ever broken copyright law.

[Triggles]

I think part of the point is that he ISN'T like google. Google covers all different subjects, not just the pirated programming. You can pretty much google anything under the sun, so much of its traffic is regular everyday stuff.

This man, however, (I think referring to him as a boy is highly misleading) focused on the pirated films, as his search engine was only tv and film products.

So there is a fundamental difference in how the businesses worked. Google does not rely on helping people locate pirated films, whereas this man's business did. He focused his business on assisting people in obtaining illegal copies of films, which means it aids in denying revenue for the people that work not only in that industry, but in any industry it impacts, including production, distribution, and retail businesses.

I think it gives a bit of insight into his character simply by noting that of all the internet businesses he could have set up, he relied on illegal pirated films to make his money.

[thebestisyettocome]

I am really unclear about your position on the rights and wrongs of watching or listening to things you haven't paid for Vicar. Are you saying it's ok?

[LowRegNumber]

Google is a general link site, it links to everything with little or no control/selection. The site in question.was targeted specifically at one activity, the operator went out and deliberately found sites offering illegal downloads and linked to them. He profited from his actions.

Further he set his site up in the US. The site, legally, is a US site. Therefore it operates under US laws. The fact that he was not sat in the US at the time is immaterial, the site itself is American.

Unfortunately if you register a site in a country then you have to he sure of the rules. The US want to prosecute him as the crime took place in their country, the site (registered in the US) is where the crime took place not a back bedroom in croyden (or wherever the man was sitting).

Personally I think he has been very arrogent and is trying to yet out on a technicality. I do feel for his mother, I am sure she is past herself but a mothers tears do not change the crime committed.

[wannaBe]

I think the explanation re google is a good one. Google hasn't set out to specifically profit from illegal activity. This individual has.

And tbh to keep referring to him as a lad or a boy is a pathetic attempt to paint him as some sort of child who knew no better. He is 23, he is an adult. At 23 my parents were married with two kids had their own house and had emigrated abroad, and many others have achieved similar. He is a man not an adult or a boy, although admittedly perhaps a bit of a manchild if he needs mummy to fight his battles from him. Bet mummy didn't see any of the profits of his crimes though ey.

[ecclesvet]

But Richard O'Dwyer did commit an offence in the UK. I don't know why you keep saying otherwise, OP.

It was found at his extradition hearing (PDF) that his actions were an offence under 107(2A) Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The judge said "I am satisfied the conduct alleged in the instant request meets the dual criminality test and would be an offence in this jurisdiction".

[Triggles]

I'm wondering if the tax office saw any of the profits of his crimes. If they haven't, I'm sure that'll be the next news story. lol

[rshipstuff]

Hmm, it seems to me that he knew what he was doing was illegal in the UK, and pretended he was a Swede called 'Oskar Hagglund':
<a class="break-all" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090129115833/tvshack.net/about" rel="nofollow noindex" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20090129115833/tvshack.net/about
He also used false registration details and address for the domain

who.is/domain_archive-net/tvshack.net/

The reason for Sweden is that it is associated with piracy in the form of Swedish website thepiratebay - TPB is still running and thriving, despite its massive piracy. Sweden also has Piratpartiet, the Pirate Party, which holds two seats in the European Parliament, and they've even registered a piracy 'religion'.

Now it's all very well to try and hide behind the laws of a country that you in fact have no association with, but rather churlish to then complain when you are charged.

Clearly this was a sophisticated commercial enterprise, and one that he knew full well was neither legitimate nor legal. No doubts: www.fluther.com/69998/advice-needed-havedo-you-use-tvshacknet-and-can-you-explain-to/

Further, when his domain, tvshack.net, was seized by the FBI, he set up another one, tvshack.cc. Hello????

And there was a mailinglist, tvshack.org.uk, where people could register for where to go after tvshack.cc got closed down....

It's not all fun and games, ignoring FBI shutdown notices.....

Here's WHY the FBI want to extradite and imprison him:

www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/01/us_movie_piracy_crackdown/

That was July 2010:

"Criminal copyright infringement occurs on a massive scale over the internet, and reportedly results in billions of dollars in losses to the US economy. That translates into lost jobs and real hardships for ordinary working people,? said US attorney Preet Bharara, in justifying the action.

?If your business model is movie piracy, your story will not have a happy ending.?

It couldn't be much clearer.

So what do you in response to this threat from the world's most powerful law enforcement body, which has an active extradition treaty in place with your country?

Why, you transfer the whole site to another domain within just a few days.
www.zeropaid.com/news/89830/tvshack-back-up-under-different-domain/

'Whether or not one agrees with the methods of the sites that were raided, it does start to call in to question the effectiveness of the raids conducted by ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement from the US). If these raids only serve to be little more than a minor inconvenience to some of these sites, would this effort to stop these site be a waste? Really, it?s bad enough that there are a hundred sites itching to take the place of one site that was taken down, but when the sites don?t even really go down at all, doesn?t that add insult to injury for enforcement?

There?s already a copyright czar in the US. It suggests that the US government isn?t going to tolerate copyright infringement, but what?s the difference so far in terms of trying to stamp out piracy? Before the copyright czar, when sites were raided, most of the time, that was it and the sites fold. Here we see stories of takedowns becoming more of a brief inconvenience for site owners more than anything else.'

That was what did for him. That's why he deserves to be extradited.

He setup a website, pretending to be Swedish, that he knew was illegal.

Then, just to confirm that it was illegal, as if there had ever been any doubt, the FBI said 'your website is illegal, we are seizing the domain, and here's a warning - pirates will not be treated lightly'.

So he responds by sticking two fingers up and moving the website to a new domain with no change at all.

And now he's complaining that having been busted once, and ignored the very light warning, that four months down the line, they want to extradite him?????

Sorry, but no sympathy. None at all.

Obviously when seizing people's domains, something that allows them to get on with their lives, does nothing, you have to try a harsher approach.

Clearly if the FBI hadn't tried to extradite him the site would be continuing to operate.

I don't think it's too hard to understand really. No, he was not in the US, but he was profiting from mass piracy of US-owned and US-generated content. So yes, it is their concern. Most of the stuff being pirated was US-owned. You would expect the US to respond to that, just as you'd expect the UK to protect British interests.

Really sick of these sob stories.