Richard O'Dwyer

Hi everyone

Now, I know I said I was going to write something each week for The Big Questions, but I might not do one for tomorrow's episode, because it's all about spiritual stuff and I'm not really into that. I might still write about it when it's on, but there's no certainty I will be bothered with it.

I'm going to talk about a man named Richard O'Dwyer, who has been in the news a lot recently. Like the founders of Google, Yahoo, Megavideo and many other websites, he set up a website containing links to other websites, most of which contained copyrighted television material. The USA have decided that they want to punish him for it, and for some reason, our Government is actually going along with this. They are currently planning to extradite him to the United States, which Judge Quentin Purdy has ruled in favour of. He is still appealing, so hopefully he can get out of this.

There are many reasons why I think this is blatantly ridiculous, so I'll try to bullet point them:

1. This contravenes freedom of expression. There are many people who want to post something online - myself included - and something that we should be really proud of in this country is that we don't censor people, because that's just not what we do. I'm sorry if some companies are being breached in terms of copyright, but that's life, and if they really want to prevent it, there are better ways than this.
2. The potential penalty is way out of proportion. If someone does something illegal to this extent, you fine them - you don't ship them off to another continent and give them up to 10 years jail time in a foreign nation, a child can see how pathetic that is.
3. Richard hasn't actually done anything wrong. He set up a website, that people posted some links on to other websites. Boo hoo. Extradite him, and you might as well extradite the people who created Google. But those people have more money than he does.
4. Richard is British, and these crimes happened in the UK. There may be occasions where it is necessary to work with another country in order to capture a criminal, but that treaty is supposed to be there to protect the innocent and tackle crimes where people are actually at risk. If there is going to be a criminal trial - and I don't think there should be anyway - there is absolutely no need to subject Richard to the stress and humiliation of having it happen in the USA, when this actually doesn't have anything to do with them at all. We are not America's puppets, we are the UK and we shouldn't feel the need to jump when America snaps its fingers.
5. The USA doesn't care about Richard at all, all they are interested in is showing him off as being this big pantomime villain and making an example of him, which is NOT FAIR UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

There, I managed five. I think that sums it up.

Anyway, I found a petition against him being extradited, which I think everyone should sign. This isn't just about Richard, it is about our rights to have freedom of expression on the Internet. If this goes ahead, anyone could be next. Here is the link:

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-extradition-fair-uk-trial-for-richard-o-dwyer.html

And finally, you may notice that throughout this blog, I referred to Richard not by his surname, as most articles do, but by his first name. The reason for this is that I like to make these things a bit more personal. When referring to someone by their surname, it becomes easy to think of them as a unit, but by using a first name, you remind yourself that here is a real person, and any one of us could be in his shoes. So please sign this petition and do your bit to help a man who is in a very unfair situation at the moment.

See you soon, blogsters! (Ooh, I think I just created a word then!)