Wikipedia's founder calls for Richard O'Dwyer extradition to be stopped

[alp227]

Last edited Mon Jun 25, 2012, 12:43 AM - Edit history (1)

Source: The Guardian

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has made a rare political intervention to call on Theresa May to stop the extradition of British student Richard O'Dwyer to the US for alleged copyright offences.

Launching an online campaign, Wales said O'Dwyer, 24, was the "human face" of a global battle over the interests of the film and TV industries and the wider public, which came to a head in the global outcry against the proposed US legislation, Sopa and Pipa, cracking down on copyright infringement.

O'Dwyer, a multimedia student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces up to 10 years in a US prison for founding TVShack.net, a crowdsourced site linking to places to watch full TV shows and movies online.

"When I met Richard, he struck me as a clean-cut, geeky kid. Still a university student, he is precisely the kind of person we can imagine launching the next big thing on the internet," Wales wrote in a comment article for the Guardian.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/24/wikipedia-founder-richard-odwyer-extradition-stopped

[MichaelMcGuire]

1. K & R

[MightyOkie]

2. So?

I call for cooler weather for my trip to So Cal next week.

[freshwest]

3. It sounds like he did launch the next big thing which turned out to be a rip off. I understand, the

'Once it's out there it's out there,' meme, a lot like the 'three second rule' but this was going on for years and I watched sites gradually losing videos, unable to maintain the permission of the copyright holders. I saw TVshack and others go down a long time ago. This guy was not sharing content for political or educational purposes. That has some protection.

RIAA and others have threatened so many sites over the years for making copyrighted materials available, such as the epic battle with Sweden's Pirate Bay which was entertaining reading at the time. The owners have gone international with enforcement of the laws. But I don't see the reason behind a 10-year sentence when violent criminals get less.

Perhaps Wales thinks of this as a white-collar crime, a misunderstanding between people of that class, and should be handled with money changing hands only.

Big sites like hulu follow the law and remove programs owners want removed, if they can't negotiate fees. They play commercials which probably means the copyright holders are still getting profits from each play. If this young fellow had done that, perhaps this would not have happened.

Between this and the Assange case and a few others, one's citizenship no longer protects one against cases filed from other countries. I'm sort of hoping that he is not extradited, perhaps an arrangement to pay damages would be accepted in the future to take the threat of incarceration off this guy's future.

[Suji to Seoul]

4. RIAA. Let's keep our morally bankrupt asses richer by going after file sharers

Most artists don't care. Their handlers do though because it costs THEM money!

but the RIAA is wealthy, so the governments will do everything they want.

[freshwest]

7. RIAA is fricking insane. But then, they are not the only ones. Scary stuff, going to jail for

Something that they already got paid for... And they sometimes don't pay the artists at all.. Or short them. They are swimming upstream, just losing real talent to greed. That SCOTUS didn't hear the case of the American student with the huge judgment put on him... It was stunning. This is just going to stunt a lot of creativity. Sick, is what it is, but this guy in the UK.. I think he was thinking of the quick buck. We'll see if Wales's influence helps him.

[newthinking]

10. His was a catalog of links, not content.

[clang1]

5. Wikipedia's founder calls for Richard O'Dwyer extradition to stopped

'O'Dwyer, a UK citizen who has not travelled to America since early childhood, faces two charges of copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, each carrying a maximum of five years in prison. Under UK law, comparable offences carry a maximum sentence of six months. In his first major interview since his arrest, O'Dwyer told the Guardian he is trying to ignore his potential fate in order to complete his degree.'

24 Year student..Copyright infringment? Extradition? Fucking TV Shows? 5yrs? WTF? Hmmmm... What another complete and utter crock of shit!!!! More authoritarian bullshit. I can see why Wales is getting involved. It's out of control here. Out of fucking control.

RIAA=SWINE

Who needs their damn tv shows and movies, boycott the f'ing bastards. Pile the shit up and burn it, it's trash anyway at this cost. Nobody needs this stuff.


24 year UK guy in a barbarian American prison for tv shows and movies? For something that would be a 6 month maximal sentence in UK? Nah uh uh. Bet people over their think America is batshit crazy. I think it here. This is completely out of control.

[newthinking]

8. Used to be extradition was reserved for things like murder, espionage

There are three types of serious crimes now in the US.

Violent Crime

Drug use / sales

Pissing with the corporate bottom line

How much time does someone get for battery? How about breaking and entering? Compare that to what this man did, which was provide LINKS (not the actual content).

[clang1]

12. It's what happens when the world is upside down n/t

[newthinking]

9. For providing LINKS, not actually even hosting the content.

[clang1]

11. Astounding n/t

[Karen Ellis]

6. Spam deleted by gkhouston (MIR Team)