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Apologies if this has been done before - I searched but nothing came up, and to be honest it bears repeating anyway.
I'm not politically active by any standards, but this seems (to me) to go against any sense of natural justice. I don't know if a simple petition will be enough to change anything, but it must be worth trying:
"Richard O'Dwyer is a 24 year old British student at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He is facing extradition to the USA and up to ten years in prison, for creating a website – TVShack.net – which linked (similar to a search-engine) to places to watch TV and movies online.
[b]O'Dwyer is not a US citizen, he's lived in the UK all his life, his site was not hosted there, and most of his users were not from the US. America is trying to prosecute a UK citizen for an alleged crime which took place on UK soil.[/b]
When operating his site, Richard O'Dwyer always did his best to play by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links, not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users.
Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean that copyright can or should be unlimited. It does not mean that we should abandon time-honoured moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood."
What Richard has done isn't a crime here, and may not be a crime in the US either. If you want to help, sign the petition [url= http://www.change.org/petitions/ukhomeoffice-stop-the-extradition-of-richard-o-dwyer-to-the-usa-saverichard ]here[/url].
More information [url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/24/richard-odwyer-extradition-threat-tvshack-net ]here[/url]
Thanks,
Rog.
Two things:
1, He knew the site was in a grey area and took pains to host it in Sweden where he thought it'd be fine. He also relaunched the site after the domain was seized, a point where most of us would have realised this might not end badly. He was a kid when he started it but made a bit of an error of judgement.
2, That's still no reason for the extradition. There hasn't been a crime committed in the UK so he shouldn't be extradited. Parliament wants to reform the rules but for some reason they won't halt extradition proceedings until this is done so stuff like this happens.
I've signed a petition previously on this and written to my MP.
Heard him interviewed on the radio a few times and IMO he sounds like a d1ck, but there is no reason to send him to the states at all.
I must admit the fact that he happily made money out of the advertising on the site troubled me as well, but then everything comes back to the fact that what he was doing wasn't illegal here.
I don't think you can say that what he did was not a crime here, it has just not yet been proven in a court of law. During the extradition hearing the judge held that what he was accused of was illegal in the UK.
Despite that I don't support the extradition. He should be tried here if the CPS feel that there is a case to answer. There is no more reason for him to be extradited to the US than to any other country.