Website owners could face extradition to the US for breaches of copyright even if they have no connection to the US and are not directly hosting copyrighted material.
That is according to an official from the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
The basis for prosecution, says Barnett, is that the addresses are routed through American Internet infrastructure owner Verisign, based in Virginia.
“The jurisdiction we have over these sites right now really is the use of the domain name registry system in the United States. That’s the key,” he said.
Whether it is illegal in the UK to link to pirated material rather than host it has been a growing source of debate.
A prosecution against website TV-Links for doing just that was thrown out of court last year amid doubts any law had even been broken.
Richard O’Dwyer, a computer science student at Sheffield Hallam University is currently facing extradition to the US over his website TVShack.net, which catalogued links to non-licensed movie and TV streams.
It is claimed his site had no US connection and did not run through servers based anywhere outside of Britain, and no copyrighted material was hosted on the site.
TVShack was targeted as part of ICE’s Operation In Our Sites campaign against online piracy, which has seized the domain names of 125 unlicensed film, TV and Sport websites and physical merchandise sites.
The UK’s current extradition agreement with the USA, signed in 2003, is highly controversial and was criticised in the case of NASA hacker Gary McKinnon.
Apsergers sufferer McKinnon hacked into NASA searching for eveidence of aliens and has been battling extradition to the US for nearly ten years.
As it stands, the law does not currently allow judges to consider whether a case is heard in the UK or abroad.
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This is totally ridiculous. There are many domain extensions not just .COM, .NET etc
The U.S.A should have no legal power to prosecute UK nationals for internet relates issues.
Thats my feeling on the matter though it may change.
roflmao ... why are the governments that are getting fallaciated by these huge corporate bodies so thick? Is it because there is no blood in their brains?
One Size Does Not Fit All:
Trying to run a single Internet space with the multitude of laws, regulation, interests and opinion that span the globe is at best optimistic, and will always present problems. The USA is not the only country looking to influence ICANN's part of the World Wide Web and if Internet users want something different, then they don’t have to look far to see that there are alternatives.
ICANN's main aims has always been to convince Internet users that they're the only game in town and then try to herd everyone into a tiny part of an otherwise infinite universe. In this respect, ICANN has been quite successful. However, it's rather like telling people that the only place they can shop on the entire planet is your local Safeway (not that one...the other one) and that really…..really, there's nowhere else to go. Of course this is sheer nonsense and it’s understandable that people are starting to look at the alternatives.
Anyone can now create their own set of Top Level Domains at no cost and without reference to ICANN, simply by opting to register NON-ICANN Dashcom (not Dotcom) domain names. Dashcoms are more memorable and relevant web addresses such as "sports-com", “live-music”, "social-network” and even "eweek-europe" etc. Here is a part of the Internet that’s totally outside ICANN's control yet able to exist quite happily alongside it. At present, resolution is via an APP, but new ISP links are coming online to negate that need.
It’s only a matter of time before other new options surface, and none of them will have anything to with ICANN.
These ICE people are known for making outrageous statement to "scare" filesharers. In law the crime occurs at the location of the server. There you go