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

Sorry, in my last post

'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.'

should read

'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 under the laws of another.'

I lol'ed at biased BBC video (linked above) describing him as 'funding his education' with the cash, as if crime is somehow an imperative or excuse for going to university now.

This: www.richardodwyer.co.uk/work.html web design/development work that he did is what normal people would consider funding your education.

Developing a massive criminal enterprise is not.

so according to the bbc it is ok to shoplift to fund your education. Bit rich when the BBC charge students a license fee for just having a TV even if they never watch the BBC.

rshipstuff thank you for the links. Very informative. It simply reinforces my impression that he was dodgy, knew what he was doing was illegal, and deserves whatever he gets as far as jail time in the US. No sympathy here.

The fact that he immediately set up a new site as soon as the other one was seized, as well as misrepresenting himself by claiming to be someone else from Sweden, clearly shows that he was well aware that he was doing something illegal. I agree this had to be a very sophisticated set up, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

ah, those links are very interesting.

Ah the power of these websites that link to other links ...

No sympathy here either.

not read the other links but i will - am happy to be educated! but just on for 2 mins before getting ready for work etc

but need to answer this
"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?"

absolutely not.

my argument was against his extradition - not against him being tried.
i think the extradition treaty between the US and the UK is flawed.

i just need to answer that question....

I'm glad to hear that Vicar, especially as you hadn't addressed that issue at all during the currency of this thread

I read rshipstuff and if all that you say he did is true well then he's been very silly, but, like Vicarina, he still should not be extradited, because even if the offense was somehow cyberly done in the USA then things must be equal and as Sarah Ferguson is not being extradited for an offense she committed in Turkey because the homeoffice say it's not a crime here then the home office must apply the same to Richard O'Dwyer, and tell the USA it is not an offence here, also having looked again at the extradition treaty I see it was tweaked after 9/11 for terrorists, but the USA is not using it for that and is actually exploiting it to suit themselves, on top of which the treaty is lopsided in that the UK has to provide various things to support their extradition requests and the USA does not, hardly fair is it? I can't help wondering if the UK is just plain old scared of the USA which also makes me wonder if so, why?

gerty5, we have had extradition treaties with the US since 1792.

This is nothing new, the procedure is actually tougher to extradite from the UK to the US than from there to here. It's not true that it's lopsided, in fact our courts have refused seven of their extradition requests, whereas they haven't refused any of ours at all.

It is in fact an offence here, they've considered that in court.

'The judge agreed with John Jones, barrister for the United States government, that ?because he was intimately involved in deciding who was allowed to post links on the TVShack websites, which links would be posted?, Mr O?Dwyer?s alleged conduct was a criminal offence under British copyright law.

In its argument the defence had cited the 2010 case of TV-Links, a website that offered a similar directory of links to pirated material to TVShack. The judge found it was acting as a ?mere conduit? and dismissed the criminal charges against the two men who operated TV-Links.

Judge Purdy however found Mr O?Dwyer had exercised too much control over TVShack to successfully claim the same defence. '

The 'mere conduit' defence is actually enshrined under EU law.

www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/2013/regulation/17/made
'Where an information society service is provided which consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service or the provision of access to a communication network, the service provider (if he otherwise would) shall not be liable for damages or for any other pecuniary remedy or for any criminal sanction as a result of that transmission where the service provider?

(a)did not initiate the transmission;

(b)did not select the receiver of the transmission; and

(c)did not select or modify the information contained in the transmission. '

Obviously they've considered this in court and we don't have full access to what he did.

However, I looked at the site and it is apparent, at the very least, that many/most of the links were selected by O'Dwyer himself:

A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989)
Submitted by staff 479 Views

Basically if you're compiling a site where people can submit links to pirate content, that looks to be legal (note: I am not a lawyer!), providing you are not involved in selecting/filtering them.

The mere conduit defence is I believe analagous to the postal service. If the Royal Mail carries a bomb by post, it's not liable, because it didn't know it was carrying it. Likewise, if you create a movie link website, and people of their own volition submit links to movies, that's not illegal. But if you spend large amounts of your time carefully identifying, and linking to, copyrighted movies and TV, appointing staff to do the same, then you're going to get in big trouble.

Basically the site only got popular because he manually compiled these links to copyrighted material. Illegal under UK and EU law, something that Sarah Ferguson filming orphans is not!

And, having been shut down by the US government, it's pretty damn stupid to move it to a new domain with 'Fuck tha Police' on the front page.

but then the judge has seen a conduit as something else, basically as pirated stuff which a conduit is not, my car conduits me to the shops, and I quite knowingly use it for that, but my car id not a shop it's a car/conduit. I'm not sure the judge has enough technical know how to understand the difference when it come to computers.
Also, the extradition is lopsided because the USA asked for about 150 people to be extradited so by refusing 7 they still got 143, the UK on the other hand only asked for about 50, that's part of what I'm saying the USA is exploiting the change in the treaty requesting 3 times as much as the UK, and not only that the UK have complied, what on earth is going on?

and I just looked up 'coalition our programme for government and on page 14 it says ?
We will review the operation of the Extradition Act ? and the US/UK extradition treaty ? to make sure it is even-handed.
So even this current government query the treaty's balance.

one more thing
9/7/09 Nick Clegg: ^'He must immediately renegotiate the massively unbalanced extradition treaty with the United States that offers British citizens fewer protections than our American counterparts enjoy.
Unless that happens, there will be more Gary McKinnons - more British citizens abandoned by a Government that doesn't know right from wrong'.^
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1198466/Nick-Clegg-This-vulnerable-man-hung-dry-government-desperate-appease-America.html

gerty5, it's quite normal for the opposition to criticise laws before getting into power.

The current government DID review the operation of the Extradition Act, they conducted a full review, which lasted a year and covered all aspects of our oextradition arrangements.

You can read the results here www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/us-v-odwyer-ruling.pdf

The fact is the independent review concluded the arrangements with the US are not imbalanced at all.

It's not true that the US have requested 3 times more extraditions, although there was a spike in 2003, since then there have been 94 by the US and and 52 by the UK. I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable that they should request more people than the UK, they are about 4 times bigger than us.

As for the 'mere conduit' issue, the fact is that O'Dwyer lovingly compiled much of the massive database of copyrighted content and therefore has no 'mere conduit' defence. He knew his site contained illegal content, because he put it there!

er, sorry, wrong link above. The Extradition review is here: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/police/operational-policing/extradition-review?view=Binary

The link above is the ruling that O'Dwyer could be extradited.

You say his site contained illegal content, but his site contained links, allegedly.

And what was the headcount for the 'spike' in 2003?

And yes I know prospective Gov'ts make pre election promises, but that doesn't
detract from the fact that in Clegg's own opinion he thought that the treaty was/is 'massively unbalanced'.

gerty5, 36 requests were made in 2003, it's in the Home Office document I linked to above.

I can't really comment on Clegg's posturing, save to say that there has been a lot of jingoistic reporting on this issue. The fact was the review was conducted by:

David Perry QC
He prosecutes and defends and has extensive experience of extradition and mutual legal assistance cases. He also acts as a consultant to the Commonwealth Secretariat and has advised overseas governments on the drafting and implementation of legislation. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Blackstone?s Criminal Practice and the Criminal Law Review.

Anand Doobay
trustee of Fair Trials International, a council Member of the human rights organisation Justice and a former member of the Law Society of England and Wales? Committees for International Human Rights and Criminal Law

plus Lord Justice Scott Baker

If you want to believe the newspapers above them, fine, but perhaps read the review I linked to above?

Also, on the 'links' issue.

Some people seem to be under the misguided impression that the UK is some sort of haven for piracy.

Fact is, it's not.

It has been determined in the past, in UK courts, that a site that merely links to pirate content CAN be illegal.

Have a look at the Newzbin case: www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2010/608.html

"The claimants are all well known makers and distributors of films. They say Newzbin is focused on piracy in that it locates and categorises unlawful copies of films and displays the titles of these copies in its indices; provides a facility for its users to search for particular unlawful copies and displays the results; and provides a simple one-click mechanism whereby users can acquire unlawful copies of their choice.

The defendant is the company that owns and operates Newzbin. It says that its website is simply a search engine like Google but directed to Usenet rather than the world wide web. It also says it is "content agnostic" and designed to index the entire content of Usenet. Where possible, it provides hyperlinks with the result that any supply of unlawful material is an act occurring exclusively between the hyperlink user and the relevant Usenet server operators and that the defendant plays no part in any such activity. "

At the bottom of the page, this statement appears:

"Newzbin indexes the contents of Usenet, however, it neither provides nor uploads any of the files that may be contained within it. Any descriptions are a result of the indexing and therefore do not relate to downloadable files."

A little later, under the heading "What Newzbin is", the page continues:

"As mentioned in the brief description, Newzbin indexes the binary side of Usenet. We are a search engine ? just like Google! ?."

--
The problem for Newzbin, the search engine was manually compiled by trusted users selected by Newzbin. Usenet links to movies, etc., consists of often more than a dozen parts. Without having all the parts, the individual bits would be useless.

Hence the editors, who carefully compiled the individual parts - hosted elsewhere - to provide users with a single link to click to download the illegal content.

There were other details, but suffice to say LINKS TO ILLEGAL CONTENT ARE ILLEGAL. If you deliberately link, from here, to a copyrighted movie, that's illegal.

That's UK law.

O'Dwyer could be prosecuted under UK law - except that the CPS evidently aren't interested. Since the crime, from which he profited to the tune of £15k/month, damaged mostly US rights holders, it's not unreasonable to extradite him there.

And btw, this was a MASSIVE site, see www.zeropaid.com/news/91805/top-5-tvshack-alternatives/ We are not talking a student sharing a few CDs with his mates, nope, this was a global site serving huge numbers of people with vast quantities of stolen content.

so that's 130 requests for extradition from the USA 123 of which the UK agreed compared to 52 by the UK, ok so not quite 3 x's but certainly over 100% more.

As to any monies made that was from the ad's placed was it not?

Is there a record of linked to films?

Actually that's not true gerty5, the UK has DENIED seven requests. That doesn't mean all the rest of them have been extradited, far from it.

From 2004 to August 2011, 54 requests (not 52, sorry) were made to the US. In this period, 38 people were extradited by the US. The remainder are in progress, or have been withdrawn.

By contrast, the 130 requests to the UK in 2004 (not 2003, sorry)-2011 have resulted in only 73 being extradited.

Evidently there are far more checks to the process in the UK, presumably the remainder have been dragged out in the courts so long, Human Rights challenges, and so on.

Yes, the money came from advertising.

Here is an archive link to the movies.

<a class="break-all" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090531160307/tvshack.net/movies/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20090531160307/tvshack.net/movies/

As you can see, a really vast compilation, and mostly American-owned content.

so, he drove a bus to the stall in the market where pirated goods were available,
he didn't charge anybody to get on or off his bus, he wasn't buying or selling any of the goods. Companies advertised on the side of his bus, H+M, coca- cola, whoever, and paid him for the advertising space.
Where's the copyright infringement?

If he was knowingly showing the people on the bus where the market was were pirated goods were available, then surely an offence is committed.

Sort of a joint enterprise argument?

I quite agree, but not one that warrants extradition on copyright infringement, and that is why the petition is asking for a fair trial in the UK

gerty5, we here in the UK are not interested in trying him as those who suffered were basically all Hollywood film studios. That said, his website was one of the world's busiest websites and was clearly a serious thing. The US want to try him, and we are obliged, by our treaty, to allow him to be extradited.

Secondly, analogies about buses are not that helpful, although I believe if someone says to you 'where can I buy a gun to shoot David Cameron', and you proceed to drive them to an illegal arms dealer, then you've probably committed a crime yourself. Not sure, but anyway - best avoid analogies I think.

Under the UK law, if you 'make available' copyrighted material 'to the public', you have committed an offence. Nothing to do with buses or market stalls or advertising. He made the material available by linking to it.

Here's a more apt analogy. I bought some Peppa Pig DVDs. I copied them onto my computer, and then I put them on my website, at www.mywebsite.com/XJAOEJJA. I don't link to that page from anywhere, and I don't tell anyone the address.

Clearly nobody is going to be able to find my Peppa Pig DVD, or even know that it's there, because the XJAOEJJA address is completely unguessable. Nobody will stumble upon it. The material is there, it exists, but it has not been 'made available'.

On the other hand, if I post the link on the internet, telling people 'free peppa pig dowmnload', then by posting that link, I 'make it available'.

People will start downloading it. In O'Dwyer's case, he did that with tens of thousands of copyrighted movies, 'making available' those movies in one place, and where the movies were hosted on other websites where essentially nobody could find them without the link from sites like TvShack.

My CV is on the internet, can you find it? No, because there's no link to it. I could choose to 'make it available' though, by posting the link here.....

We here in the UK are interested in trying O'Dwyer in the UK.

Do you mean certain members of the Gov't? the Justice Dept? the CPS? are not interested?

Analogies are very useful.

In your own peppa pig scenario you make a copy, are you saying that O'Dwyer
made copies?

He might have made the copies in some cases, I don't know. However the point is it's not who makes the copies, it's who makes it available. O'Dwyer's website made these movies available. That's the crime.

As for trying O'Dwyer in the UK, certainly his mum would like him tried here, but let's be honest she'd rather not have him tried at all. Let's not forget the context here:

1. TvShack was one of the world's largest piracy websites
2. The US went to quite a lot of trouble to close it down
3. O'Dwyer told them to fuck off and he opened it on a new domain within 1 day
4. The US then had to track him and knocked on his door, with the consent of British police
5. Only then did the website go down.

This was a US operation entirely, protecting largely US-owned movies, why should he be tried here?

It makes sense that the US go after this stuff. We don't have a major movie industry like they do, for our police to spend a lot of money closing these sites down and prosecuting the operators would be silly when the US is better suited for the job.

They are the injured party, they get the perpetrator. Apart from providing the normal degree of protection we'd afford anybody subject to extradition proceedings, there's nothing more for us to do.