The founder of renowned website Wikipedia Jimmy Wales has called for the stopping of the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer, a British student, to US on the charges of alleged copyright infringements.
The US Justice Department has been attempting to extradite the student to face criminal copyright charges for allegedly linking to copies of copyrighted films through TVShack.net, a crowd-sourced site that has been seized by the Department of Homeland Security, CNET reported.
O’Dwyer faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
Wales called O’Dwyer the “human face” a global battle between movie and TV industry interests and media consumers, which was highlighted by the recent backlash against proposed copyright legislation SOPA and Protect IP, Wales wrote in an article published in Guardian.
The bills would have allowed the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet service providers, and other companies, forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish.
He said: “When I met Richard, he struck me as a clean-cut, geeky kid. Still a university student, he is precisely the kind of person we can imagine launching the next big thing on the Internet.
“Given the thin case against him, it is an outrage that he is being extradited to the US to face felony charges for something that he is not being prosecuted for here. No US citizen has ever been brought to the U.K. for alleged criminal activity that took place on US soil.”
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