Hacker News Reader

Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

You missed the memo, but it still sucks. Juristiction depends on which country the "harm" occurred. For example, if I fire a rocket at another country, then I've certainly committed a crime within its boundaries, despite never having set foot there.

His website was accessible in the US by design (one could forbid US visitors in the ToS, and by geoip), and the "harm" from his supposed crime occurred, for those US users, in the US, not inside his server.

What sucks about this case is that it seems incredibly unlikely that linking constitutes a felony copyright infringement, because no copyrighted material is ever directly encountered. It seems much more likely that only a misdemeanor infringement occurred (if any), for which the UK does not extradite to the US.

View on HN

This is outrageous. I joined the Pirate Party to combat bullshit like this by making such crimes to be prosecuted in the home country. Especially because some countries have batshit insane penalties for IP.

Have you allowed people to upload stuff to your website and didn't stop them enough? Well, it looks like you're liable for conspiracy for copyright infringement of something. A criminal penalty of $150k and 5 years jail per infringement.

Oh, it looks like you did it to several copyrights. That's a jailin'. Who cares if you haven't visited USA before! Like that ever stopped USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hew_Raymond_Griffiths

True enough, but in this case he didn't directly cause harm and I imagine it'd never go through the courts all the way. Unless we start saying that Google directly causes harm and so on, it's the same purpose and Google profits the same, and oddly enough they're based on US soil.

As a British citizen I'm truly sickened by the idea that someone can be extradited over something which is potentially not even a crime, when the biggest name in the game is still sat with million dollar legal teams ready to pounce if they get pulled up on it.

I agree that the problem is that it looks unlikely that a serious crime occurred, and yet extradition has been requested.

However, the "Google do the same" argument doesn't fly, because Google follow the DMCA and so are exempt from being prosecuted for any copyright infringement from user-generated or crawled content.

PS - "harm" is a very general concept, so if I facilitate copyright infringement in the US from the UK, the "harm" occurs in the US, even though I'm in the UK.

>His website was accessible in the US by design (one could forbid US visitors in the ToS, and by geoip), and the "harm" from his supposed crime occurred, for those US users, in the US, not inside his server.

No one should have to concern themselves with the laws of every nation on Earth when building a website. There is usually not enough time in your life to consider the laws from only your home country.

Indeed. International copyright law needs revising - but I don't think we'll all be agreeing on anything soon, especially after the whole SOPA debacle.

If you run a dubious website, your only option is to block all countries other than your own, and provide a notice to that effect.

Is it silly? I dont know. It's hard to argue that you have the right to interact with a country's inhabitants but that the country cannot govern those interactions. Though the governing needs to be fair...

Where does the government derive authority to govern interactions where only half take place inside their borders?

Easy: half of it took place within their borders. When you interact with other countries you do so on their terms, because they are sovereign.

Of course, if a crime is only half-committed in one country, then it is also only half-committed in the other country (presuming it is a crime in both). So either of the countries must be free to prosecute.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com