UK sends citizen to stand trial in US

A Briton is paradoxically being sent to stand trial in the US for alleged criminal copyright infringements committed in Britain.

The British Home Office says it will not block the extradition of the 24-year-old student Richard O’Dwyer despite strong public backlash to a court decision to hand him over to the US.

The announcement by Home Secretary Theresa May, who can veto the court decision, comes despite an online petition set up by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales against O’Dwyer’s extradition that has so far gathered 210,000 signatures.

The petition draws attention to the absurdity of the situation in which the US is trying to prosecute a Briton for alleged crimes in Britain.

“Richard O’Dwyer is a 24 year old British student at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He is facing extradition to the USA and up to ten years in prison, for creating a website – TVshack.net – which linked (similar to a search-engine) to places to watch TV and movies online,” the petition says.

“O’Dwyer is not a US citizen, he’s lived in the UK all his life, his site was not hosted there, and most of his users were not from the US. America is trying to prosecute a UK citizen for an alleged crime which took place on UK soil,” it adds.

This comes as Wales also said in an interview with The Guardian that the case represents part of the “endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood.”

O’Dwyer started the TVShack.net website back in 2007 as a link to live-streaming video versions of television shows or for downloads but his website did not contain any of the material themselves, rather offering visitors only links to those material.

“TV Shack is a simple resource site. All content visible on this site is located at 3rd party websites. TV Shack is not responsible for any content linked to or referred from these pages,” a statement on his website read.

This comes as O’Dwyer had also removed the links he offered on the few occasions that copyright holders had requested him to do so.

His case represents an embarrassing case of the British government failing to protect its own citizens as British judges earlier decided not to mount criminal proceedings against him because a similar case had been thrown out in early 2010 by a judge who said linking to copyright infringing material is not a crime.