In the news this week is 23-year-old British student, Richard O’Dwyer, who studies computer science at Sheffield Hallam University. He is under fire from the United States Department of Justice and is accused of criminal copyright infringement. The United States is seeking O’Dwyer’s extradition so that he can be tried for the offense in a U.S. court. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.
The act in question that has this youth in hot water with Uncle Sam is the linking of copyrighted material on a website he ran up until last November called TVShack, which served up links to other websites who hosted pirate copies of popular TV shows and movies. TVShack itself, it seems, didn’t actually host any copyrighted content. This would put it more along the lines of an aggregator, similar to a search engine like Google that only links to websites.
This behavior on the part of the United States is akin to arresting a person for keeping a list of shops that sell bootleg copies of movies or TV shows and sharing that list with friends. As far as I’m aware, there is no law against that. Unfortunately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has made linking to infringing material a legal gray area for which there is no set legal precedent.
There are two problems with this situation. The first is the silly notion that the extradition treaty between the United States and Great Britain is somehow a good idea, especially when you consider that it allows targets to be extradited without the courts being able to weigh the evidence. Team America: World Police, indeed.
The second problem is the continued lobbying efforts and money thrown at the governments of the world by the movie and record companies that are allowing these sorts of draconian laws and punishments to happen. Recently a Canadian man was fined $60,000 by a U.S. court for sharing two adult films via BitTorrent. Not only is the idea of a southern-California court convicting a Canadian citizen living in Canada laughable, but the fine itself is ridiculous.
It’s very clear that the United States’ interests lie with the copyright holders and not with its people. All you have to do is follow the money.
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