ICE seeking extraditions of foreign website owners

[Carlos A. Afonso]

Yet another incentive for us all to use our ccTLDs instead of the gTLDs
run by US-based companies?

--c.a.

On 07/06/2011 10:11 PM, Joly MacFie wrote:
> http://isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=2310
> 
> Peter Walker of UK newspaper The Guardian
> reports<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/03/us-anti-piracy-extradition-prosecution>
> that
> United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is looking to
> extradite owners of websites it believes are breaking US copyrights – even
> if their servers are not based in America or are legal in their own
> countries. The rationale is that the use of generic top level domain names
> like .com and .net, administered by Verisign in the US, provides “nexus”
> thus giving them jurisdiction. At issue is the case of tvshack.net – a
> linking site run by an English student Richard O’Dwyer. The domain already
> was seized by ICE. O’Dwyer now faces extradition. Walker quotes ICE
> Assistant director Erik Barnett:
> 
>  “Without wishing to get into the particulars of any case, the general goal
> of law enforcement is to arrest and prosecute individuals who are committing
> crimes. That is our goal, our mission. The idea is to try to prosecute.”
> 
> On linking:
> 
>  “I’ll give you an analogy. A lot of drug dealing is done by proxy – you
> rarely give the money to the same person that you get the dope from. I think
> the question is, are any of these people less culpable?”
> 
>  In England there are calls to amend the extradition agreement with the US
> so that a UK judge can decide jurisdiction on individual cases..
>