“Pirating” UK Student to be Extradited to the US

[Neith]

I'm really fed up with my government sticking their noses into other countries' business.

On April 15 of last year, fulltiltpoker.com, partypoker.com, and pokerstars.com, all UK-owned, were seized by the FBI for alleged money-laundering. Charges were brought against the owners of those sites, while they were allowed to re-open operations as long as they didn't allow people from the US to play for money.

On February 28 of this year, Canadian-owned bodog.com was seized by the FBI (and is still down) for conducting "an illegal gambling business," even though it's perfectly legal to gamble online in Canada.

After skimming a couple of articles, it would appear that Bodog and TVShack might not have had any problems if they had .ca or co.uk addresses.

Why Bodog's fate suggests .ca domains are a safer harbour than .com
Have a .com web address? Know the legal risks

The fact that TVShack was only linking to stuff and not actually hosting it like Megaupload did concerns me. I co-run a service that hosts thousands of message boards. We have a very small staff, and we can't police every single post that's made on our system. Do we have to worry about being arrested, fined, and imprisoned if some of our members link to stuff they're not supposed to and we don't catch it?

[Xander Zzyzx]

Murder someone in cold blood and you can be out in a couple years if the judge is particularly lenient that day.  But if you cost a company to draw less than their calculated maximum profit, they'll go for blood, and you MIGHT get out before you die of old age.  Because corporations are people with all the privileges and none of the restrictions, and money is far more important than human life.  After all, prisons are such a profitable business themselves.

And that bolded part right there just about sums up my thoughts on what's wrong with this world, but since that will never change, I'll just resign myself to cynicism.

[DasFuchs]

I am no longer worried about being invaded.

I am now worried about being the invader.

Seriously, though, why the fuck can't America keeps its greasy tentacles out of other countries?

Same reason Britain couldn't when it was still an Empire