Update: Jimmy Wales sez, “They have NOT said no yet. It sounds like the chap from V3 got someone on the phone to
read the standard statement.”
Hundreds of thousands of Britons have signed a petition asking the Home Secretary to abandon plans to extradite Richard O’Dwyer to America. O’Dwyer, a student, has a website called TVShack that contains user-submitted links to TV show streams and downloads — some legal, some infringing. This is almost certainly legal under US law, and is absolutely legal in UK law. Nevertheless, O’Dwyer faces being rendered for a round of punitively expensive dirty litigation by US entertainment giants.
Despite all this, the Home Secretary has declined to reconsider O’Dwyer’s case, and is set to send him off to America. As Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales wrote in the petition, “No US citizen has ever been brought to the UK for alleged criminal activity that took place on US soil.”
More on this from V3’s Alastair Stevenson:
“Richard O’Dwyer is wanted in the US for offences related to copyright infringement,” a Home Office spokesman told V3.
“The UK courts found there were no statutory bars to his surrender under the Extradition Act 2003 and on 9 March the Home Secretary, having carefully considered all relevant matters, signed an order for his extradition to the US.”
Home Office to ignore Wikipedia founder’s petition against O’Dwyer extradition