And all that is (or should be) completely irrelevant since we are talking about a British guy hosting a website that not primarily targeted US audience.
I am not a lawyer but I am fairly sure O'Dwyer does not have to abide the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Google, as an American Website, however has to.
At that level of income, a significant part of his audience could be proven to be from US. It would also matter if he used US servers, US registrars (.net is controlled by Verisign which is an American corporation) and so on, but I doubt prosecutors would have much issues in proving US jurisdiction once he's in USA.
What you say makes sense, assuming that jurisdiction is clearly with the country that is requesting extradition.
What I fail to understand is why the US has jurisdiction here. What brings this crime to the US? If it is just that the US is on the Internet too, then the logical extension would be to pass this guy around every country in the world, which is clearly ridiculous.
He should be answerable to the law. But the UK seems like the appropriate jurisdiction here, not the US. If the problem is that UK law doesn't cover this case, then that is what should be questioned, rather than pretending that the US has jurisdiction in order to work around the rule of law.
From the message of the petition it appears that also him complied with take-down requests.
Let's say the truth that we all know... Google, is google, they cannot go against it because it's too big, it's easier to bully with someone smaller than you.
I don't know if you're from US, but that's not how things work: don't get me wrong, there's a lot of bullshit in the US regarding SOPA, how laws are made, how lobbying works, but legal-wise, the more money you have, more of a target you are, so if Google were to do illegal things per US legislation, they would be sued even faster than this kid.
I suspect the main difference in Google versus a specifically-made torrents search engine is the good faith criteria that would apply to Google. Also, it's not enough to reply to take-down requests in order to plea safe harbor protection, you actually need to have a registered agent and pay the registration fee (around $100).
The point is that the DMCA provides a safe harbor for the masses of copyright infringement on YouTube. The UK doesn't have the DMCA, so no safe harbor.
Any links on Google to pirated content are an initially unavoidable byproduct of crawling the web. Whereas providing access to pirated content was this guy's core business and value proposition.
