Join Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales: Protect Internet Freedom And Seek Justice for Richard O'Dwyer
Hi, I am Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and if you care about justice and the future of Internet freedom, Demand Progress and I need your help. This will only take a few seconds, but you can really help us change things for the better.
Richard O'Dwyer is a 24 year old British student at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He is facing extradition to the USA and up to ten years in prison, for creating a website - TVShack.net – which linked (similarly to a search-engine) to places to watch TV and movies online.
O'Dwyer is not a US citizen, he's lived in the UK all his life, his site was not hosted there, and most of his users were not from the US. America is trying to prosecute a UK citizen for an alleged crime which took place on UK soil.
The Internet as a whole must not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement. As citizens we must stand up for our rights online.
Please sign on at right here to join me in demanding that British authorities refuse to extradite O'Dwyer, and that US officials cease persecuting him.
When operating his site, Richard O'Dwyer always did his best to play by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links, not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users.
Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean that copyright can or should be unlimited. It does not mean that we should abandon time-honored moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood.
Richard O'Dwyer is the human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public. Earlier this year, in the fight against SOPA and PIPA, the public won its first big victory. This could be our second.
This is why I am petitioning the UK's Home Secretary Theresa May to stop the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer, and asking the United States to end his prosecution. I hope you will join me.
- Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder
Source:click here
I'm not a big wikipedia fan so you should know that I would rather let the blind master from Kung Fu shave my pubes with a straight razor in a pitch black room than be on the same page as wikipedia. If it was staff at wikipedia getting fucked I would have no problem but in this case it appears that the U.S. Government is overstepping its bounds. This is the same government that doesn't do shit in the middle east,ignores Pro-American sentiment amongst the Iranian youth yet they can persecute some guy running a tv guide style website. This is rediculous and the U.S. government should just hang it up on this one. If you feel the same way sign the petition.
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