The case is the government’s most far-reaching effort so far to crack down on foreigners suspected of breaking American laws. It is unusual because it goes after a middleman, who the authorities say made a fair amount of money by pointing people to pirated content. Mr. O’Dwyer’s backers say the prosecution goes too far, squelching his free-speech right to publish links to other Web sites.
The relevant facts are as follows:
The U.S. government has brought criminal charges against a U.K. resident and are attempting to extradite him to face these charges in a U.S. court. The U.S. alleges that he ran a site that did NOT contain “pirated U.S. movies”, but rather linked to sites that DID contain pirated U.S. movies. According to the article in the Herald Tribune”, the U.S; initially asserted jurisdiction over a person in the U.K. because the domain name, TVShack.net, was registered in the U.S.
This strikes me as one more example of the U.S. (and the Obama administration in particular), infringing the sovereignty of other nations. I would be interested in your comments on this. I am also aware of the U.S., asserting jurisdiction over a citizen and resident of another country based on the use of one the many free U.S. email providers.
Here is the article that appeared in the New York Times (note that I am linking to it).
Here is some British commentary. This clearly questions the right of the U.S. to assert jurisdiction.
You may recall that the Isaac Brock Society has considered these issues related to this in relation to SOPA.
Have read about this story before…very creepy indeed. If he committed any criminal offenses he should be charged in the UK. I didn’t realise until now though that the US was actually charging him on the basis that .net is a US domain – I thought they were just arguing along the lines of copyright infringement. This is a huge pandora’s box waiting to explode if this cathes on, seeing as many non-US websites use .com or .net. Megaupload was also a .com website, for example. I imagine that many other sites that the US has in its sights also feature domain names that could get them into trouble..
I applaud the foresight of Petros to move this website to Canada!
Ooops, aren’t even some .fr and .uk etc free mail addresses actually hosted in the US?
But do you actually think that the UK would accept extradition of their own citizen for this? It seems that even Assange, even as an Aussie, is safe from extradition to the US while in the UK; he is afraid that Sweden might subsequently extradite him to the US.
@Jefferson
The articles that I linked to make it clears that (at least initially) the U.K. has allowed this U.K. citizen to be extradited. I find this incredible. Now, in the case of the other person I mentioned, the issue of whether the extradition will be allowed is before the highest court in the country.
Also, yes there is concern over whether data hosted on U.S. servers is subject to U.S. jurisdiction (I suspect that it is). Interestingly, there are now a few internet service providers who make it a point of saying that their data is NOT hosted on U.S. servers.
Finally, the New York Times article claims that the Obama administration has shut down something like 800 sites that it views as undesirable.
So, yes this is a big, big problem.
Check this out:
http://tvshack.cc/
Apparently .cc is attached to the Cocos Islands, Australian Territory (Personally had never heard of them). Under what international law can US customs seize a foreign web domain?
@Don
My impression from the NY times article is that they are claiming U.S. jurisdiction based on having run the site with the .net domain. I don’t see how or think the U.S. could seize a foreign domain name. But, remember the foreign domain name could be an address to a site that is hosted on U.S. servers.
To avoid problems with the U.S. (say you want o run a site promoting Romney instead of Obama), you would want a non-U.S. domain with the site hosted outside the U.S. Obama would think it was crime to promote another candidate.
There is much that is unclear from the article. But what is clear is that:
The U.S. is asserting jurisdiction over a non-U.S. citizen for conduct outside the U.S. This is very dangerous and the whole world needs to be concerned about this – the technicalities aside.
As Badger notes, the U.S. has gone completely insane.
@renounce Again, a reinforcement of my long-held idea that if you give’em an inch they’ll take a mile. Let the US screw US persons living in a foreign country? That country’s non-US-person-residents will one day become the target of US extraterritorial meddlings as well!
Given the .cc TLD, maybe the US argument has something to do with the fact that the site is available to US browsers. Still, flabbergasting. Next steps if carrying the consequences ad naseaum: sites in every country not available to every other country. Bonjour! Defeat the purpose of the Internet entirely…
I am not sure what the attractiveness of .cc is, other than perhaps (attempted) avoidance of US jurisdiction. wikileaks.cc appears not to exist.
@badger US policies: pure hubris.
By the way, if you need good German language reference, dict.cc is a good one.
Well, Google provides links to legal and illegal copies of things, so why doesn’t the FBI shut down them too?
I would think it would be easier to try to prosecute this fellow over existing UK copywright laws. Most countries already have tough laws for this. Even here in the “3rd world” copywright laws can lead to huge civil penalities that could ruin someone’s life. I’ve followed a couple of such cases here very closely.
But we all know how the US is: destroying someone’s life in quiet is not what they like. They want to create a huge scene with guns blazing, or some other equivalent action which brings “shock and awe” into the equation, allthewhile with the media getting their “fix”.
The guy broke UK laws and should be held responsible under the UK system. After all, how can a non-US person even be aware of US laws? Are sovereign countries going to throw out their own laws and start using US laws?
Thankfully I live in a country that has and will likely always put its foot down to the US in the area of deportations. Native Brazilians WILL NOT get deported. Naturalised people can, but only for drug-related offenses. <– This latter clause was the result of US pressure.
If I were British, I would be up in arms about this. What’s next? A name change to “UK of America”?
@geeez Correction: the US also quietly destroys lives of minnows, that is why we have to continue to get the word out.
I would think that the UK would be more adamant about it’s sovereignty, after all it went to war to protect the Faulklands.
The immature part of me is filled with schadenfreude. The United Kingdom forced Hong Kong to sign awful extradition treaties when they ruled over us — now they know what it feels like to be on the fuzzy end of one. Too bad that the same people involved with the negotiation and the passage of that treaty are not the ones being extradited far from their homes to face trial by a foreign jurisdiction …
@Don Pomodoro — .cc is run by VeriSign, so .cc domains are just as vulnerable to U.S. pressure. Technically VeriSign is only an outsourcing provider for the country/territory NIC (Cocos Islands?), though. Theoretically if VeriSign did something the Cocos Islanders didn’t like, they could take back control of their TLD. In practise I have the feeling that’s rather unlikely.
A lot of the small island countries have the same problem: they’ve outsourced management of their TLDs back to the US. If you want a really safe & sovereign TLD, you have to pick one where the local economy generates a sufficient pool of technical workers who can run the TLD on their own.
This story is pretty dumb the guy is a criminal, I can see however how one can use it to accuse the US of overreach, but the fact is the guy made 6 figures from ad revenue by making accessible links to pirated content. The UK had the first shot to prosecute they passed, the US is taking action to prosecute, the bi-lateral extradition treaty between the US and the UK had been deemed fair by the British government until some kicked up a stink and now it’s being “reviewed” just for clarity the US has never denied a single UK extradition request, none.
I feel for you guys but demonizing the US isn’t going to get you sympathy or empathy from American’s, especially when you use hyperbole. The generic TLD’s are de facto American not because the US chose to dominate the world but simply because we just happened to be first to organize them. Now as to whether the US should “control” the internet through ICANN I can’t really say that I have a strong opinion with the proviso that allowing China, the Saudi’s, Iran, etc. to decide what is allowed or banned on the internet I’d have a big freaking problem with.
*
There was a recently published article on the now 25th anniversary of the .ca domain.
http://www.castanet.net/news/Canada/77942/A-quarter-century-of-ca
@WhoaIt’sSteve, We love your comments around here. I suppose we should all just start paying tribute to the United States; why don’t we make it $200 head tax per person around the globe. Then, $200 * 6 billion = 1.2 trillion would be slightly less than your country’s budget deficit. Do you think you folks could possibly balance the budget then? It would require only about 300 billion in spending cuts. No. I didn’t think so.
But personally, do you want my opinion? The people running your country are the criminals, starting with the guy in the Whitehouse, then Congress, then the bureaucracy. This guy in UK who linked his site to pirated material does not seem anything like a criminal. Shall we do some comparisons between him (a little fish in another country) to some of the mafia types in Wall Street (J. P. Morgan, bankster types, Jon Corzine who stole billions?). The problem with the justice system in the US is that it is corrupt through and through. They go after the innocent small fry in order to justify its existence. That’s why Conrad Black went to jail for moving boxes out of his Ontario office and why not a single bankster who committed fraud during the sub-prime mortgage even suffered from the abuse of indictment. Black had no ties to the organized crime in your government, but Corzine and others are highly connected.
I wonder why they haven’t raided Youtube’s CEO house and jailed him, with all the pirated content on there. Sure, it’s not as bad as Megaupload as for pirated videos, but from a music point of view, you can pretty much find anything on youtube. I guess the music industry is not as powerful as the movie industry. But I don’t see how Salar Kamangar would be less of a criminal than Kim Dotcom for providing services that allow to share illegal content. I guess the difference is that he provides American jobs.
@Petros: You asked if US could balance its budget with 1.2 trillion ($200 per person around the world).
First, your numbers are off. The US would not apply a head tax to any American citizen living in US where they belong, so that takes 300 million people out of the equation.
US would only apply a head tax to every person everywhere in the world who is not a US citizen and to US citizens and former citizens who do not want to live in US. They would, of course, also apply it to immigrants like Cristophe and others.
After they have collected the head taxes, they still won’t be able to balance their budget.
As Ronald Regan said “Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.” That was three decades ago. Now US government keeps trying to find a need for money it doesn’t get–so it financially attacks those living outside its borders.
@Blaze, You’re right. But I was working with significant digits. That’s a concept I learned in science class where you can safely ignore certain numbers. If Obama was doing the math, he would have of course discounted the 57 States from the head tax, and you would be exacting a $200 head tax on the remaining 6 billion people minus the population in the 57 states. Then you would come up with 200 * (6 billion minus 300 million) = 3.5 quadrillion in new tax revenue. That’s Obama math. Did you see how he proposed his $1.5 trillion deficit and then made a big deal about how he was going to make 100 million in budget cuts? Obama is a math dunce.
Or 10,000 people died in a tornado in Kansas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=185iI_nXYRY
Fifty seven states:
@Petros: “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” (Plato)
Unfortunately, IRS, Congress and the President are incapable of using either in their decision-making.
While we’re on the topic of Obama’s problems with numbers, we may want to have a look at Romney’s problems with language. One of his assistants announced this weekend that Romney “Retroactively” Resigned From Bain Capital.
Well, we now know for sure that Romney will fit right in in Washington. That’s where the Supreme Court tried to retroactively reinstate citizenship to those of us who did not want it reinstated. That’s where IRS tries to retroactively penalize people for not filing FBARs that they didn’t know about. That’s where Congressmen want to retroactively punish anyone who dares to commit the “despicable” act of renouncing US citizenship today.
But, “retroactively retire?” Strange. In my entire career in Human Resources, I never knew of anyone who “retroactively retired.” Yet, Romney now claims he “retroactively retired” from Bain three years earlier than documents confirm.
Hmmm.
@Blaze,
Very good observation. Is there an icon for shaking one’s head or is it just one for rolling one’s eyes?
@Calgary: Here’s a link to the actual article which I neglected to include above.
http://blogs.bostonmagazine.com/boston_daily/2012/07/16/mitt-romney-retirement-bain-capital/
He’s not even claiming it was a month earlier (possibly plausible). He’s claiming it was three years “retroactively.” That sounds like the Washington Way.
Either way, this spells trouble. Mitt, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.
@Petros Thanks, and for the most part I agree, Washington is full of crooks, it’s hard to pick out almost any of them that you could call the “good guy.” I’ll also say I think our tax system is unfair and unjust to citizen’s living abroad, not to mention in general taxes are just not something enjoyable to anybody.
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