[Wikimedia-l] "Wikipedia founder's petition: Stop extradition of O'Dwyer"

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Evolution of political battles (this one on "piracy").
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/24/richard-o-dwyer-my-petition
> This is currently first on http://www.guardian.co.uk/ (UK news but I've seen
> it on TV while they were showing headlines on Euro 2012...).

The petition text is at

http://www.change.org/petitions/ukhomeoffice-stop-the-extradition-of-richard-o-dwyer-to-the-usa-saverichard

"Richard O'Dwyer is a 24 year old British student at Sheffield Hallam
University in the UK. He is facing extradition to the USA and up to
ten years in prison, for creating a website – TVShack.net – which
linked (similar to a search-engine) to places to watch TV and movies
online.

O'Dwyer is not a US citizen, he's lived in the UK all his life, his
site was not hosted there, and most of his users were not from the US.
America is trying to prosecute a UK citizen for an alleged crime which
took place on UK soil.

The internet as a whole must not tolerate censorship in response to
mere allegations of copyright infringement. As citizens we must stand
up for our rights online.

When operating his site, Richard O'Dwyer always did his best to play
by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove
content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links,
not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users.

Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and
economic purpose. But that does not mean that copyright 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.

Richard O'Dwyer is the human face of the battle between the content
industry and the interests of the general public. Earlier this year,
in the fight against the anti-copyright bills SOPA and PIPA, the
public won its first big victory. This could be our second.

This is why I am petitioning the UK's Home Secretary Theresa May to
stop the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer. I hope you will join me.

- Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder"

We only have an English Wikipedia article about O'Dwyer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O%27Dwyer

-- 
John Vandenberg