TVShack: a British citizen may be extradited to the USA

The British creator of the site TVShack may be extradited to the USA where he risks a multi-year prison term for copyright violation. He is appealing this decision.

The site TVShack with its .net extension was one of the first sites targeted by American authorities who proceeded to seize his domain name through the In Our Sites operation in the summer of 2010.

TVShack.net offered links that pointed towards TV series hosted on a range of third party platforms (most often MegaVideo). The creator of TVShack.net is a 23 year old British IT student. An English court has deemed that Richard O'Dwyer can be extradited to the United States where he will stand trial.

Richard O'Dwyer has decided to appeal this decision. In the United States, he would risk up to five years in prison for copyright violation to a country where he has never set foot and where his site was not hosted. British authorities, for their part, took no action against the young man.

After being arrested in London in November 2010, Richard O'Dwyer admitted that he was the owner of TVShack.net, but not TVShack.cc. The site with the .cc extension was implemented to get around the seizing of the .net domain name. He was earning up to 23 000 dollars per month with the advertising generated on the TVShack.net site.

Such a decision has once again brought to the fore questions about the extradition treaty between the United Kingdom and the United States. Accused of having hacked into the US military and NASA’s servers a few years ago, hacker Gary McKinnon (who suffers from a form of autism) continues to fight against his extradition.