badbadmonkey - 3:58 am on Jul 6, 2011 (gmt 0)

The point of this article is the enforcement processes that can be taken against the accused, i.e. extradition from the resident country, despite no connections whatsoever (!) to the US.

If the US wants to claim jurisdiction over .com I think that more or less goes without saying. There should therefore be no crying if they shut down the domain. Tough cookies. It's their playground.

Abusing international crime laws in the way that the Guardian rightly warns us of, the example here being the O'Dwyer case, is a whole different story.

If O'Dwyer was a blatant pirate I have little sympathy for his feeling the weight of the law over his head - but without doubt it should be British law, and what fellow citizen would disagree it would be unconscionable to ship him off across the Atlantic to a foreign country and cast him to the mercy of an alien law the jurisdiction of which he was never under?