Copyright Infringement Allegations Are Getting Out Of Hand

DRE

Well-known member
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.

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.

The internet as a whole must not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement. As citizens we must stand up for our rights online.

When operating his site, Richard O'Dwyer always did his best to play by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links, not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users.

Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that
does not mean that copyright can or should be unlimited. It does not mean that we should abandon time-honoured moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood.

Richard O'Dwyer is the human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public. Earlier this year, in the fight against the anti-copyright bills SOPA and PIPA, the public won its first big victory. This could be our second.

This is why I am petitioning the UK's Home Secretary Theresa May to stop the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer. I hope you will join me.
- Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder

http://www.change.org/petitions/ukh...on-of-richard-o-dwyer-to-the-usa-saverichard#
 
If you're in the UK, do not elect this woman again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_May

Theresa-May-December-2009-001.jpg


Now I gotta track down who in the US asked for an extradition cause this is retarded.
 
The combination of governments and internet always makes me smile in a sad way.

Here, we have an organization that fights these sort of things as well. They wanted to let everyone with a website (or, for example, Facebook profile) to pay for each embed video they have on there to pay the musicians. Then, they wanted to do the same to a website for actually linking to music.

Silly people.
 
The combination of governments and internet always makes me smile in a sad way.

Here, we have an organization that fights these sort of things as well. They wanted to let everyone with a website (or, for example, Facebook profile) to pay for each embed video they have on there to pay the musicians. Then, they wanted to do the same to a website for actually linking to music.

Silly people.
WTF Where is that?
 
You do realize that after SOPA and PIPA they have now come up with ACTA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

This will not stop... I mean legislators will keep attempting to pass bills which favor the corporate lobbyists and the general population will keep finding new technologies to pirate copyrighted work. All this is all right when it comes to the entertainment industry. However these laws become a moral danger when you start applying them to the pharma sector. Pharmaceutical companies want to use bills like ACTA to prevent manufacture and shipping of generic medicines, which in poor and developing nations can save the lives of hundreds of people. But pharma co's want laws banning these for violation of their patents and sell the same drugs about 10-50 times expensively irrespective of how many people die.
 
You do realize that after SOPA and PIPA they have now come up with ACTA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

This will not stop... I mean legislators will keep attempting to pass bills which favor the corporate lobbyists and the general population will keep finding new technologies to pirate copyrighted work. All this is all right when it comes to the entertainment industry. However these laws become a moral danger when you start applying them to the pharma sector. Pharmaceutical companies want to use bills like ACTA to prevent manufacture and shipping of generic medicines, which in poor and developing nations can save the lives of hundreds of people. But pharma co's want laws banning these for violation of their patents and sell the same drugs about 10-50 times expensively irrespective of how many people die.
I'm not sure if thát is the biggest danger with ACTA..
 
What can we do? Like seriously, I just don't feel like I could stand this things getting worse. To be honest I've never really been that kind of guy that is always worried or not about what a government does as I've always lived in countries that are not my own mostly so I tend to stay away from political views and whatnot, but I think this is really getting out of hand, and if we need to I'm probably willing to put a lot of my life into trying and avoid governments having full control of the population, since it should be the other way around.

We got to do something, I know I should be doing something but I'd never really been into any type of fights or efforts to change our governments.
 
What can we do? Like seriously, I just don't feel like I could stand this things getting worse. To be honest I've never really been that kind of guy that is always worried or not about what a government does as I've always lived in countries that are not my own mostly so I tend to stay away from political views and whatnot, but I think this is really getting out of hand, and if we need to I'm probably willing to put a lot of my life into trying and avoid governments having full control of the population, since it should be the other way around.

We got to do something, I know I should be doing something but I'd never really been into any type of fights or efforts to change our governments.
" In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up. "
 
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.

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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought ICANN owned the rights to all .com and .net TLD's.

If memory serves me correct, this is how the US is getting around country specifics with those TLD's, as ICANN is USA.

Not sure how they will do with dragging another citizen across borders... but they have obviously got it shutdown.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought ICANN owned the rights to all .com and .net TLD's.

If memory serves me correct, this is how the US is getting around country specifics with those TLD's, as ICANN is USA.

Not sure how they will do with dragging another citizen across borders... but they have obviously got it shutdown.

Actually verisign operates the master registry of the popular tlds like .com .net etc and Verisign being a US entity, the US claims that every .com domain is under US jurisdiction.

I do want to make one comment though. I wouldn't actually defend a guy just because he says only links to downloadable movies were on his site. If you operate a site and members share rapidshare etc links to download movies, you must stop the practice. If you are letting that be, it means you are wanting to profit from the traffic. So there should indeed be some sort of legal action against people who directly or indirectly promote piracy. However the Big handed way in which the US govt assumes it owns everyone everywhere is what disgusts people.
 
I agree completely sadikb, in regard to perpetuating copyright infringement via linking to said content. It makes you as guilty as the originator IMHO if you leave such links present.

I stand by attitude that if you aren't doing illegal stuff, then you have nothing to worry about IMHO.
 
Signed & Shared on my FB account. The UK Government needs to grow some balls and stop allowing these sort of extraditions to go through.
 
Here in Japan things just got crazy. The government passed a bill very quietly while using all the other crap going on in the country as distraction to stop copyright infringement... by jailing downloaders. From October they are going to jail downloaders for up to 2 years and/or fine them 2million yen. Uploaders face 10 years in jail or 10 million yen fine. Most japanese household only bring in about 3-4million yen a year so these are quite hard actions.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fm20120621a3.html#.T_IS05H4KuB

Anonymous as now set it's targets on japanese govenernment and has already brought down a bunch of government website here.
 
I can't say I disagree though... copyright infringement has to stop, otherwise there won't be movies and music made available to sell at the current level today. Artists won't stop creating... they'll just stop sharing and have regular day jobs as well. If the movie industry can't pay actors... then actors go find other careers, i.e. broadway and such, where you have to go see the show, you can't just download it.
 
I can't say I disagree though... copyright infringement has to stop, otherwise there won't be movies and music made available to sell at the current level today. Artists won't stop creating... they'll just stop sharing and have regular day jobs as well. If the movie industry can't pay actors... then actors go find other careers, i.e. broadway and such, where you have to go see the show, you can't just download it.

Piracy is not a lost sale. In reality only a small fraction of users who pirate would have actually bought the item in question. I'm not defending piracy I'm just pointing out it is way over exaggerated by companies.
 
Netherlands.

Good old Holland, where every blank CD you buy is copyright-taxed, because even if you will just be using it for personal storage of your data or your own images, they might as well take your money, just in case, because they know, deep down, that you really are just going to break the law.

At the same time, the monies they collect get gobbled up by organizations that refuse to hand over the money to the actual copyright-holders.

I am so glad I moved from there. It's time to pull them fingers from the dikes...
 
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