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Comment by grepular | Hacker News Reader

Only if you're ignorant of the facts.

http://london.usembassy.gov/gb140.html

"The United States has not denied a single extradition request from the UK under the treaty. While the U.S. does send more extradition requests to the UK than it receives, this difference is largely due to the differences in the size of the respective populations. The panel report notes that the U.S. has a population about five times the size of the UK, but there have been fewer than twice the number of people extradited to the U.S. than to the UK. The number of U.S. requests is not disproportionate."

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"this difference is largely due to the differences in the size of the respective populations. The panel report notes that the U.S. has a population about five times the size of the UK, but there have been fewer than twice the number of people extradited to the U.S. than to the UK."

What? That seems extremely nonsensical to me.

Wouldn't one reasonably expect the number of extradition requests to a country to be proportional to the number of people in that country, not the number of people in the country doing the extraditing?

(edit: italics)

I would expect it to be relative to the chance of a crime being committed by a citizen of one country to the other. Maybe Americans are more likely to be the "victim" of crimes from people in the UK than the other way round. Maybe the US just cares more about certain crimes than the UK does.

The numbers of extraditions in both directions is so small that you can't reasonably declare that there is any sort of imbalance happening. You can argue that the terms are unfair, but not the way they're being implemented.

On the other hand, there are clearly individual cases that are just wrong. This one is a perfect example. Which is why it's getting all this attention.

The numbers are no excuse in case of a person that did not break UK law.

How about your country signs an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia and you get extradited and have your head chopped off for having a beer, since alcohol is illegal in SA? (Yes, an absurd stretch, but you get the point.)

> a person that did not break UK law

the judge believes he broke UK law. from the telegraph article:

> The defence believed its strongest argument against extradition was that Mr O'Dwyer had not committed an offence under British law, because TVShack did not itself host copyright material. European law says no crime is committed if a website acts as a “mere conduit”.

> However, Judge Purdy rejected the argument from Mr O’Dwyer’s barrister, Ben Cooper of Doughty Street Chambers, because of the control the student had over what links were posted on TVShack.net and TVShack.cc.

So that's it? If a judge believes it, then it must be true! He's not even a proper judge!

> So that's it?

not really. he gets to appeal.

> If a judge believes it, then it must be true!

who else do you expect to enforce laws? the better question is, do you know anything about british law? why do you think your interpretation of british copyright law is better than the judge's?

> He's not even a proper judge!

i'm not sure what you mean by this.

Your statement is not contrary to anything I said, or think, so I feel no need to argue in response.

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