Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old British college student who operated the TVShack link site, can be extradited to the United States, ruled Judge Quentin Purdy of the Westminster Magistrates Court today. O'Dwyer's attorney says he will appeal the ruling.
As we first reported in July, Richard O'Dwyer operated a popular "link site," which provided users with access to content hosted elsewhere on the Internet. Many of the links were to infringing copies of copyrighted material.
Neither O'Dwyer nor his servers were located in the United States during the time he operated TVShack. But the US government is nevertheless seeking to have him extradited to the United States to face criminal copyright infringement charges.
The legality of linking sites in the UK is disputed. At least one judge has argued that merely linking to infringing content without hosting it is perfectly legal under British law. In a November court appearance, O'Dwyer's attorney argued that the student had not broken British law. TVShack was no different from sites like Google and Yahoo that sometimes link to infringing content, he said. But the US government disputed that argument, contending that O'Dwyer had deliberately promoted links to infringing content on the TVShack home page, and was thus responsible for them in a way that Google and Yahoo were not.
Judge Purdy apparently sided with the United States. "There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O'Dwyer in the USA albeit by him never leaving the north of England. Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA," he wrote in his decision today.
Richard O'Dwyer wore a grey T-shirt and blue jeans to court. He reportedly showed no emotion as the ruling was read.
His mother, Julia O'Dwyer, was livid. She said that Judge Purdy did not have the "technical brains to know about the whole thing. That guy just lives and breathes extradition."
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