Another of those 'copywrite people are going too far' thingies.

This one pissed me off because I hate hearing about it when my country pulls bullcrap like this on foreign nationals -- particularly when they're not breaking the law.

http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/odwyer/?akid=1422.2138774.to3ob7&rd=1&t=2


In short, some British dude started a website where he let other people post links to places online to find obscure TV shows. He didn't host clips or anything -- just links, and just links that other people put on his site -- and they want to put him in jail and fine him an absurd amount of money. This is just stupid.

 

Signed.

 

Napster already lost this fight long ago... but what isn't mentioned there is that this guy also made more than a quarter million dollars in ad revenue from the site. And was delivered a shutdown order for the site, after which he just moved the entire contents to a different domain with the same content. Oh, and what he did was ruled illegal under UK law as well.

If he was directing people to non-copyrighted material, there wouldn't be a copyright infringement case and this would be a moot point. I find it more likely that the works being linked to were already licensed for international distribution in that region and he stepped on a lot of executive toes on both sides of the pond. Now he's taking the fall.

The extradition deal sounds shaky at best but I don't think this is just some guy taking the blame for corporate greed. Anyone tech-savvy enough to deal with IP issues these days should know how volatile the situation is and err on the side of caution. That side is not making money on a site that links to copyrighted content and end-running around a takedown order.

 

Still, if what he was doing was illegal in UK as well, then they should've let UK deal with it. Otherwise it really is nothing more than a witch hunt.

 

Right, and the UK has already approved the extradition order. Their way of dealing with it is using existing law to let the wronged parties deal with it. How is this a witch hunt when the guy who committed the crime knowingly at least once, is going to be put on trial?

I'm not seeing any ambiguity here, just a false cause leveled at evil corporate greed (and don't get me wrong, there is plenty) over an average-looking dude setup to be a persecuted innocent. If anything, US citizens signing the petition are trying to exert force in UK law, since that's where this all starts.

 

Going another way, why can't they use UK's system to prosecute him there instead?

If he supposedly committed a crime according to UK's law system, and he did that in UK, then he should be put on trial there. If he is put on trial in US instead, based on their law, then something is wrong with it because he wasn't bound by their laws but by UK's laws instead, and it would make more sense for them to get a proxy and prosecute him in the UK according to the laws of the country that were broken.
Besides, after the stuff concerning MegaUpload it does look like a witch hunt, regardless of whether it is one or not. And the whole "approved the extradition" thing looks as if they were afraid of US's crusade of faux justice for something (I'm not saying that they should allow people who break law to roam free, but they should not act like international police - unless what he did was so severe that an extradition was necessary, and it wasn't, they shouldn't use that option so freely).

 

The tone of the "call to action" in the OP is misleading. It doesn't mention that this guy made money from ad revenues where his site directs you to copyrighted content. It doesn't mention that he willfully tried to endrun around a site takedown order. It doesn't mention that what he's done was already ruled as illegal in his country of residence. (So, yes, it was ruled that his website did break the law.)

It does ask you to sign a petition (no matter where you are) to exert political force on a legal system (that'd be the UK) that might not even be your own. I'm not a UK citizen, why should they care what I think? They shouldn't, at all.

Let's turn the circumstances around. Let's say instead of a TV site, this guy was hosting a warez-type site that let people in another country gain access to US citizens' Amazon accounts and download a bunch of DRM-free Kindle books, or whatever. Would the "he did it in another country, let them handle the trial" argument sound as appealing?

This whole thing sounds to me like he's being extradited as a matter of courtesy and to spare the UK legal system the expense and hassle of a trial. And the response from people's knee-jerk reaction to half of the story is to start an astro-turf movement to apply political pressure to a foreign government. Regardless of how silly extradition sounds..... this whole thing falls at the feet of UK law, and US (or anywhere else) citizens petitioning THEM as foreign nationals is.... I don't even know. It's silly.

 

This. I'm pretty sure it is actually against international law for agents of one government (in this case, prosecutors in Britain) to represent an aggrieved party of another nation (companies in the US). It's a conflict of interest thing. My older sister is a former prosecutor and practicing lawyer, I could shoot her an e-mail and ask to be certain.

As for the rest of it, if what Darkmere says is true (and I haven't researched this case at all, nor do I intend to) then the guy is getting what he deserves. If he didn't, it sounds more like a classic case of biting off more than you can chew (a person who continues poking the hornet's nest after being shut down once is obviously looking for a fight.)

In defense of the copyright people, as a person who works a job were I can mostly make money from copyrighted material, let me tell you that protecting copyrights is a big deal. Sure, the big guys don't "need" all that extra money, but they are the ones who do most of the heavy lifting to ensure that little guys like me, who can't really afford to enforce our own copyrights, are protected. Sometimes their zeal is excessive, but I don't think it warrants a petition every time they do something to protect their rights. Petitions rarely change people's minds, anyway, and the real greed is found bad corporate leaders, not governments.

[civics]OK, governments are pretty greedy too.[/civics]

But if it's "corporate greed" that bugs you, you should just stop buying their stuff. Right?

 

That is an issue, I agree. People who sign on that least need to be from either UK or US, otherwise there's a touch of hypocrisy in the act of signing it.

I don't know much about his website, but wasn't it supposed to have links to places that allow one to watch things online, as opposed to links to downloadable content? Because it if was, then it only allows watching it on the sites to which links were given and gives no way to get a copy of that, and if there was content that was truly illegal on those sites, then the problem is with said sites, not with his. On the other hand, if he did allow people to post links to downloadable content (of questionable legality, as most TV shows aren't legally downloadable) then it was a bad thing, most likely; either way it also boils down to what he put in the site's rules, because there's often a problem with that and with discrepancies between what is officially allowed and what is really posted by users.
And there's also the issue of international law, as opposed to US law - I think that if there is something a citizen of UK had done, then he can only be prosecuted according to international law or UK law. Not whether he is to be tried according to international law or US law is something to be seen, and I'd be very dissatisfied with the issue if it was the latter (on the other hand, if it was the former, then it is likely that there are clauses in international law they used to get the whole thing running).

You know, that is a good argument. Regardless of how it sounds, they might be trying to get him to US to spare UK the hassle of going through the whole thing. I still think there's something wrong with the whole thing, but that is another matter entirely.

 

Petition: I still say US citizens have no valid say in UK extradition laws. What do you think the response would be if Mexican citizens tried to mount a petition campaign to get US immigration laws changed? Dual-citizenship is a different matter, but little to none of that seems to apply here.

I actually just poked around a bit trying to find details of what the site actually *did.* I don't know the mechanics of it, but the constant thread seems to be "I went there to watch stuff for free, and they had a lot of ad pop-ups." This tells me that he was getting ad revenue from facilitating access to copyrighted material. I can also guarantee you that there was no licensing fee paid to any of the copyright holders (even a crappy syndication contract for an off-the-air show can cost millions per season's airing rights). No matter what his site policies were, this wasn't a user-sharing forum site, and it wasn't a P2P facilitated thing. Interesting side-note.... after the first site was shutdown, and then the site in question was shutdown, a third site by the same name seems to have sprung up with the same content.

I'm not sure on much of international copyright law, but I know it exists because I can watch Doctor Who legally. I'm sure there was some mutual agreement about these things so we can import kooky Britcoms and they can, uh.... I dunno. Watch our horrible reality TV? Still, this whole situation was probably provided for beforehand somewhere. That's where to start looking, I'd say.

 

Just a small note: there is no guarantee that he actually made any significant money just because there were ads. I personally have had sites with decent traffic and pretty significant ads and made less money for the ads than I paid in hosting.

 

This thread was an interesting read, I'm just wondering if you could clarify a teensy bit what you meant with "faux justice", Kazeto ? As for the case itself... I'll leave you outspoken guys to it.

 

It's pretty simple. There's no "universal" justice, and if one person tries to force his own justice unto other, for as long as there are people who disagree with it and have morally acceptable reasons to disagree, it will never be anything more than a faux justice. And the same applies to countries.
US's crusade against internet-related "crimes" (I am not qualified to say whether they were really crimes or not) has a wide opposition, therefore it is not "universal" justice but rather a faux one, called justice because someone thinks it is just, but it isn't really "just" (as in "fair"), just something they call "justice".

 

The sad part is that the USA invented the internet, and because of that, they see themselves as having the majority stake in it. The problem is, people do not like the internet to be strictly policed. It's one of the few places left where you can just talk about something in a public discussion and not have your head ripped off by the next person. We have our own rules preventing that sort of thing from happening here. Real life has no such luxury. You have to keep your head down or you end up paying for it, too many times to count. We have posters in my home city popping up all over the place, EULOGIZING the dead leader of the LTTE terrorists. Anyone asking awkward questions about them tends to get "visited" by pro-LTTE sympathizers and "given" an unpleasant "talking-to."And any idiot with half a brain on his shoulders can figure out that the terrorist got what was coming to him in the first place.

To avoid steering our discussion into dangerous waters, back to the subject at hand. While what the defendant did may have been illegal, Essence hit it on the head; ad money doesn't exactly come out at the rate you figure it does. In theory you can get pay-per-view or click going, but the funds generated are slimmer than you think in practice; often, all it means is that you pay less in bandwidth than your original hosting charges.

The USA, when it comes to conflict of interest, especially of the rich against the poor and international affairs, have a bad habit of playing the world's Big Brother. If there's one thing wrong with them, it's that "Mind your own business unless we need help" has no meaning to the American Congress, much less their CIA or FBI. Some of their actions may be laudable, but most of the time they just want to flex their political, financial, and military muscle. Look all around the world, and you'll see that the Americans have the best methods to blow everything up beyond recognition. You don't even fight wars anymore; stick a pilot in front of a computer screen and flight panel, and blow everything up with a Predator! They took most of the risk out of fighting a war this way, so there's not much in the way of backlash locally as less soldier lives are lost. No offense to anyone who's done time in the military, but it indirectly acts as a shield for their actions in many ways.

TL;DR: There will be no tears shed if the world's master puppeteer, America, ever gets humbled by the other nations, or even subversive groups.

 

This is true, sadly.

Also, bonus points for realizing the Internet existed before the WWW was invented by that British guy at CERN.

I don't know what LTTE is, what country do you live in, if you don't mind me asking?

I wish automation of warfare was fully realized, the less soldiers killed the better. but that's not the thread for this.

As for this, I don't know, it does look like he broke the law, and was caught. Not given Faux Justice. Honestly, that sounds like something you'd say about Fox News.

 

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
That seems to be them, activities based in north Srilanka. They started the civil war from '83 to 2009.
They seem to have been pretty....bad, from what I read in the paragraph titles:

• 8 Human rights violations
  • 8.1 Attacks on civilians
  • 8.2 Women fighters
  • 8.3 Child soldiers
  • 8.4 Ethnic cleansing
  • 8.5 Execution of prisoners of war
  • 8.6 War crimes
• 9 Other criminal activities
  • 9.1 Sea piracy
  • 9.2 Arms smuggling
  • 9.3 People smuggling
  • 9.4 Extortion
  • 9.5 Money laundering
  • 9.6 Passport forgery
  • 9.7 Drug trafficking
  • 9.8 Credit card fraud

And some people see these guys as the "good guys"....
Humanity, why?

 

• 8.2 Women fighters

Er, I'm a bit confused how having women fight is a human rights violation.
Unless it's like forced conscription and forcing them to be targeted for being killed first?

 

I just copied that part, actually, but wondered a little about it, too.
Let's read up!
Edit:
"Women fighters

LTTE women’s involvement in the leadership and fighting forces of the group has given rise to fierce debates about whether the visibility of females in the LTTE fighting forces represented the ‘true’ liberation of the Tamil women and whether women in the general public would enjoy equal rights during the post-conflict period. Actually, the Tamil Eelam is the overarching goal of the LTTE, and the emancipation of women has always been a secondary issue dependent on the liberation struggle. All the existing literature illustrates that the LTTE has been unsuccessful in creating the gender equality within the movement, and suggests that women have the right to achieve their emancipation and empowerment without linking to interests of the nationalist and ethnic struggles."
So, it seems that it stood there because the equality between the genders was not given.