Richard O’Dwyer, a 22-year-old undergraduate studying multimedia in Sheffield, England, rose uncharacteristically early for a student on Nov. 29, 2010, in preparation for a lecture later that morning. So the knock on the door of his small hall of residence room before 7am did not wake him — but he was far from prepared for what would come next.
On the other side of the door waited two officers from the City of London police, accompanied by two leather-jacketed men from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
O’Dwyer’s next two years were about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. The call would place him at the heart of the running battle between the Hollywood giants — struggling to keep their beleaguered business model intact in the online era — and a new digital generation unwilling to play by the old rules. What brought the ICE agents to O’Dwyer’s door was his role in setting up a small Web site, TVShack.net, linking to sites where people could watch US TV and movies online. To prosecutors in New York, this made him a worthwhile target in the battle against copyright infringement.
Although several recent extradition cases to the US have attracted controversy, in none does the gap between the alleged crime and the punishment sought by US prosecutors yawn as wide. Many have been angered by the US’ eight-year effort to extradite Gary McKinnon, who is afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome, for allegedly hacking into Pentagon computers; O’Dwyer faces extradition and a potential sentence of up to 10 years simply for letting people in the UK find somewhere to watch Iron Man 2 before its release.
In his first big interview, O’Dwyer tells how he became the unlikely poster boy of the 21st century’s culture war.
“I was up early,” he said. “Then policemen turned up with two American men, wearing matching Top Gun jackets,” he said.
“I was half-waking up, half-confused. When they started talking I couldn’t hear what they were saying, because I was too tired, but it was something about TVShack. So I was like, ‘Okay ... bugger.’”
O’Dwyer, a quiet, clean-shaven man who looks younger than his 24 years, had set up the site in 2007, at the age of 19, at the suggestion of a friend. It was a “human-powered search engine” for people looking for places to watch films, TV and documentaries online. Users could post links to video content — on YouTube, the now-defunct Google Video, MegaVideo or elsewhere — that contained full TV programs or films. O’Dwyer’s site would check the link worked and add it to its search engine. The site quickly became a specialized search engine for TV and film content, plus a forum for people to discuss and review the films.
“I told a few friends and maybe they told a few friends, and it sort of spiraled from there, and shot up fairly quickly, popularity-wise,” he said.
As the site grew, eventually reaching an audience of around 300,000 people a month, so did O’Dwyer’s workload — and Web site hosting bills.
“It’s hard to maintain, with so many people [using it], I had to put adverts on to pay for the Web hosting to get more servers to cope,” he said. “Lots of advertisers seemed to e-mail the contact address on the Web site. I just basically picked one out of the hat and put them on the Web site and obviously, when traffic went up, so did the revenue. That’s the way Web sites work.”
Over the three years it ran, according to court documents, the site’s growing audience generated more than ￡140,000 in advertising revenue. O’Dwyer hasn’t denied the figure, but says a lot of it went on running the site. The rest did not make for a lavish lifestyle: Takeaways, pub rounds, electronics and cinema tickets saw it dwindle away, he claims.
“I frittered it away — I haven’t really got anything. I bought a computer, a few other things,” he says. “[I] spent it like buying other people their things when we were at an event or something. Say at the cinema, I’d just buy everyone’s cinema tickets.”
O’Dwyer — perhaps ironically given his circumstances — is a cinema buff. With revenues from his site, he made four visits a week and still visits twice a week.
“It’s much better to see a film in the cinema,” he said.
However, the US authorities became concerned about a site linking to content often still within copyright. To sell a counterfeit CD or DVD of a copyrighted work is an offense, as is deliberately uploading such a work to the Internet.
US customs officials, after campaigning from industry bodies, contended that linking to such items on other sites (as search engines and others automatically do) would also be covered by such laws.
This is a contentious interpretation of the law, even in the US, where linking has in some court cases been regarded as protected speech under the First Amendment. Part of the reason for the huge backlash against proposed copyright laws, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) was that this provision would come under attack.
O’Dwyer says he had not really considered the legality of his site — he did not know much about copyright — but did comply with legal notices from publishers asking him to remove links, on the few occasions he received them.
The ICE targeted TVShack.net in June 2010 by taking his Web address, known as a domain, and replacing it with a large warning against copyright infringement.
The site was quickly back up and running at a new address, tvshack.cc. All ran smoothly until the knock on the door in November 2010.
After a quick search of his room, resulting in the seizure of his computer equipment and paperwork relating to the site, O’Dwyer was taken by the City of London police to his local police station for interview. Hoping to get the process over quickly, he refused a lawyer.
“I didn’t have a solicitor with me, because they told me it’d take two hours to get one. I wanted to make it to my uni lecture, so I thought I’d just get it over with. Turns out the solicitor is next door to the police station,” he said.
O’Dwyer had a 45-minute interview — missing his lecture — and was bailed for about six months to appear at a London police station. He texted his mother, Julia, to tell her he would be heading to the family home in Bolsover, Derbyshire, that evening.
“Weird day,” he said, laconically.
Unknown to O’Dwyer, his mother Julia had been having a similar day: At 7am, five police officers had turned up at her home and searched it for his possessions. She had then been taken to her local police station and interviewed about her son’s activities.
“It was a bit of a shock really. They came in, said they wanted to talk about Richard and his Web site. They wanted to look in Richard’s bedroom,” she said.
She did a recorded interview with police but, unlike her son, had a lawyer.
Reunited at the end of the day, they made sure TVShack.net was taken down, PayPal accounts closed and other e-mail accounts shut. The site was finished.
“We just thought maybe he was going to get charged with a copyright offense,” said Julia O’Dwyer. “He was a bit upset, and I said ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get a lawyer and we’ll sort it out.’”
It was not so simple. When Richard O’Dwyer reported to the London police station in May last year, he was told that the UK case against him would not be pursued — but there was a sting in the tail.
“So we had a momentary sigh of relief, Julia O’Dwyer says. “Then — I’m not kidding — the next sentence is ‘Oh, we’ve got an extradition warrant for you from America instead, so you must go immediately to the court,’ and then the handcuffs were on, he was taken away,” she said.
Richard O’Dwyer was presented with two US charges: criminal infringement of copyright and conspiracy to commit criminal infringement of copyright. Each carries a maximum five-year prison sentence. Julia O’Dwyer recalled the wait in the extradition court: “It was the most terrifying day so far.”
As Richard O’Dwyer’s case was not being heard that day, his hearing was simply for bail, which he says the US prosecutor opposed. Bail was agreed — with him suggesting terms to the non-technical solicitors and judge. However, as Richard O’Dwyer did not have his passport or the ￡3,000 (US$4,675) bail bond by 5pm, he spent the evening in Wandsworth prison in London.
“Being in prison for setting up a Web site was something myself, all the other inmates I talked to and the policemen were confused with,” said Richard O’Dwyer. “It’s not something you’d expect, would you?”
When his bail was cleared the following day, the legal challenge he faced was considerably bigger than he had expected. His extradition hearings are based solely on proving he has a case to answer in the US, that his actions, if proven, would be a crime in both countries and other technical points. Challenging the details of the case could only be done in US courts. Richard O’Dwyer is baffled that it is the US that is prosecuting him.
“The evidence is here, I’m here, I’ve never been to America since I was about 10,” he said.
“There’s literally no reason I can think of why it has to be heard in America ... at no point was the site ever in America,” he added.
“I think they’re trying to use my Web site as a sort of guinea pig to try to scare everyone else making linking Web sites,” he said.
In an attempt to give her son a relatively normal life as his case progresses, and to keep him in the UK, Julia O’Dwyer — a community nurse working with terminally ill children — has become a campaigner against the extradition of her son and others to the US.
Having previously barely used the Internet and having never heard of Twitter or other social networks, she has raised more than 20,000 signatures on a petition for Richard O’Dwyer and spends a lot of her day online, starting before work and often going until 1am or later.
“I just went straight home after we got Richard the next day and started looking at the Internet to find out about extradition. That was the first thing. I was just on it, full on, looking at copyright law, looking at extradition, trying to find a good barrister,” she said.
“I don’t think I started any campaigning until June or July. People helped me — I thought, ‘What do you do with Twitter?’ — but people helped me and I got going,” she added.
It is an effort not lost on her son, who has continued his course in multimedia studies at Sheffield Hallam University against the background of his extradition hearings. He is working with Sheffield consultancy Rocca Creative during a year in industry.
“I don’t let their extradition warrant ruin my life. Otherwise you’d fail, just sit in your room all day moaning. They’d be winning if I let it do that. [Julia O’Dwyer] seems to be doing it all day, I think. Non-stop. She does a lot of the actual work on things. And if she didn’t ... I think I’d probably be there by now. I’m very grateful for her doing that,” Richard O’Dwyer said.
So far, their efforts have proved unsuccessful. Despite gaining the support of senior politicians including Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron and Home Affairs Select Committee chief Keith Vaz, Richard O’Dwyer’s extradition was approved in court and by British Home Secretary Theresa May, who must clear all UK/US extraditions. His appeal efforts are currently centered on a high court hearing, due later this year.
As his case continues, Richard O’Dwyer is trying to keep his focus on his studies, and what he would like to do afterward. Described as an “enterprising young man” by Dominic Raab, one of the legislators who have spoken in support of his case, O’Dwyer wants to continue developing Web sites — despite the TVShack experience.
“I like doing Web development, and hope to keep making various Web sites. It’d be good to join a big Web company I think, just for the experience. I like Twitter, Facebook. I did apply to Google for a placement once, too,” he said. “But eventually I’d like to start my own project. New startup companies keep coming up all the time, don’t they?”
However, until his battle through the UK courts — and with the Home Secretary — is over, any career plans Richard O’Dwyer wants to make for the next decade come with a hefty degree of uncertainty.
If Richard O’Dwyer were to be extradited, the people behind other sites which link to TV shows and films — which include Google, Bing, Reddit and many of the other sites at the heart of the Web — may have their own reasons to fear for the future.
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