Copyright wars heat up: US wins extradition of college kid from England

A 23-year old student from Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England is bound for America. That wouldn't be unusual -- except that Richard O'Dwyer won't go voluntarily.

The UK Home Secretary has agreed to extradite O'Dwyer over US copyright infringement charges for running a "linking site" called TVShack. Back in June 2010, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized O'Dwyer's tvshack.net domain name after a closed, one-sided hearing before a judge. (All domains ending in .net and .com are seizable by US law enforcement, regardless of where their owners are located.) But O'Dwyer soon had the site back up at a new address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging users to update their bookmarks. In November 2010, British police showed up at O'Dwyer's home. As Julia O'Dwyer, Richard's mother, told us last year, "They had two American guys with them, which Richard assumes were men from ICE. They questioned him about his website. It wasn't more than an hour. The ICE men shook his hand when they left," she said. "One of them said 'Don't worry, you won't have to go to America.'" Richard, apparently realizing that his site had become a serious matter, took it down. A couple of computers were seized, and he hoped that would be the end of the matter.