TVShack's student founder can be extradited to US, court rules

[Tony]

In the recent awesome thread that was epub DRM?! http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=30361 a common sentiment that I picked up on was along the lines of

Quote:

Canadian forum; legal in Canada; who cares?

So here's an interesting development http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jan/13/tvshack-student-founder-extradition

Quote:

TVShack's student founder can be extradited to US [, from UK]

19 year old (now 23) made a search engine (or just a listing of links). This happens to be (most likely) legal in the UK, but US is all up in arms as those links happen to be to other websites with pirated TV shows.

UK citizen. Lives in UK. Servers are in Netherlands. Reason for extradition?

Quote:

In July the agency's assistant deputy director told the Guardian that ICE would now actively pursue websites similar to TVShack even if their only connection to the US was a website address ending in .com or .net. Such suffixes are routed through Verisign, an internet infrastructure company based in Virginia, which the agency believes is sufficient to seek a US prosecution.

So sure, something might not be illegal in UK (or Canada), but if US cares enough, they can just bring you over to be tried in their courts by their own laws. I suppose that on a personal level, breaking some book's DRM does not warrant the cost of the extradition process. Still, if someone wants to put up enough money (and political influence) to royally fuck you over -- there's an option to do just that, Canadian laws be damned.

[mirhagk]

Well I actually see their point of the .com or .net being given by an american DNS. I personally don't think that's enough to extradite him, but I guess since the website is technically registered with the US, it's technically a US site.

Also note that .com used to be administered by the department of defense, and it used to be only for commercial purposes, so he's lucky it's no longer as it used to be.

And is tvshack still running, at like tvshack.tv?

Oh and last question, does canada have the same extradition treaty?

[Tony]

By that technicality, every public website is a "US site", seeing as the root-level DNS is under ICANN's control, which is based in U.S.

I don't know if the website is still running under an alternative domain or not.

There might be some country-specific details, but yes, U.S. has extradition treaties in place with Canada and most other countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradition_treaties

[mirhagk]

Alright just curious. It seems a bit ridiculous.