Free for a Fee

A 23-year old student from Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England is bound for America. That wouldn’t be unusual—except that Richard O’Dwyer won’t go voluntarily. The UK Home Secretary has today agreed to extradite O’Dwyer over US copyright infringement charges for running a “linking site” called TVShack.

Back in June 2010, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized O’Dwyer’s tvshack.net domain name after a closed, one-sided hearing before a judge. (All domains ending in .net and .com are seizable by US law enforcement, regardless of where their owners are located.) But O’Dwyer soon had the site back up at a new address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging users to update their bookmarks.

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As of June, 2012, Appeals and arguments are continuing, in England, as to whether O’Dwyer will be extradited.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/copyright-wars-heat-up-us-wins-extradition-of-college-kid-from-england/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.