14 DAY TRIAL // Jimmy Wales, best known as the founder of Wikipedia, has started an online campaign to stop the extradition of British citizen Richard O'Dwyer to the US. O'Dwyer was the admin of TVShack, a site that pointed to places where people could find movies and TV shows, most of them pirated.
The site didn't host any pirated content itself. O'Dwyer operated the site from the UK and the site was hosted in the UK. The copyright-dependent industries brought down the site eventually and asked for him to be extradited to the US to be tried.
He argued that there was no reason for this as everything happened in the UK or, in any case, outside of the US. Still, the extradition request was approved by a UK court and later by the UK home secretary. This decision was appealed earlier this year.
The case has been heavily publicized so far, for obvious reasons. Now, Jimmy Wales is weighing in, by penning an op-ed in The Guardian and also starting a petition to oppose the extradition.
"When I met Richard (along with his mother), he struck me as a clean-cut, geeky kid. Still a university student, he is precisely the kind of person one can imagine launching the next big thing on the internet," Wales wrote in his op-ed.
"Given the thin case against him, it is an outrage that he is being extradited to the US to face felony charges. No US citizen has ever been brought to the UK for alleged criminal activity on US soil," he added.
Wales argues that he is not against copyright. Quite the contrary, he believes creators should be able to protect their work from being distributed without their approval, within the bounds of the law. But copyright should not trump every other right.
"Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean it 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," Wales explained.
"Due to heavy lobbying and much money lavished on politicians, until very recently the content industry has won every battle. Internet users handed the industry its first major defeat earlier this year with the epic Sopa-Pipa protests," he also said.
Wales was a big part of the campaign to stop laws such as SOPA or PIPA from coming into being. He has now started a petition over at Change.org to ask the home secretary to block the extradition, as it needs her approval to go through.