Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has made a rare political intervention to call on Theresa May to stop the extradition of British student Richard O’Dwyer to the US for alleged copyright offences.
Launching an online campaign, Wales said O’Dwyer, 24, was the "human face" of a global battle over the interests of the film and TV industries and the wider public, which came to a head in the global outcry against the proposed US legislation, Sopa and Pipa, cracking down on copyright infringement.
O’Dwyer, a multimedia student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces up to 10 years in a US prison for founding TVShack.net, a crowdsourced site linking to places to watch full TV shows and movies online.
"When I met Richard, he struck me as a clean-cut, geeky kid. Still a university student, he is precisely the kind of person we can imagine launching the next big thing on the internet," Wales wrote in a comment article for the Guardian.
"Given the thin case against him, it is an outrage that he is being extradited to the US to face felony charges for something that he is not being prosecuted for here. No US citizen has ever been brought to the UK for alleged criminal activity that took place on US soil.
"From the beginning of the internet, we have seen a struggle between the interests of the ‘content industry’ and the interests of the general public. Due to heavy lobbying and much money lavished on politicians, until very recently the content industry has won every battle.