UK student faces extradition to US after piracy case ruling

Found on The Register on Friday, 13 January 2012
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A 23-year-old student is facing extradition to the US, and possibly five years in a federal prison, after the British courts ruled he should face charges of copyright infringement for linking to websites hosting pirated content.

O’Dwyer gave evidence that TVShack “worked exactly like the Google search engine… (it)…. directed users through the use of searches to websites… at no point was there any infringing material, such as movies or programmes on my server. It just directed users to other websites by providing the link”.

O’Dwyer is being extradited under controversial laws agreed by Tony Blair in the wake of the September 11 attacks – then billed as essential to the war on terrorism - which are currently being used to try and extradite Gary McKinnon on hacking charges.

That's simply abuse of the law. O’Dwyer did nothing that is basically illegal. He linked to content, something that every website does, something that's the basic idea behind the Internet. If the targets of those links fail to secure their content, then it's their problem. There are enough methods available to stop direct linking to content, but they chose simply not to do it. Then O’Dwyer build a website which users liked and for that he should now go to jail. Google too points to tons of copyrighted material; in fact most probably just use Google to find what they want.