A 23-year old student from Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England is bound for America. That wouldn't be unusual—except that Richard O'Dwyer won't go voluntarily. The UK Home Secretary has today agreed to extradite O'Dwyer over US copyright infringement charges for running a "linking site" called TVShack.

Back in June 2010, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized O'Dwyer's tvshack.net domain name after a closed, one-sided hearing before a judge. (All domains ending in .net and .com are seizable by US law enforcement, regardless of where their owners are located.) But O'Dwyer soon had the site back up at a new address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging users to update their bookmarks.

In November 2010, British police showed up at O'Dwyer's home. As Julia O'Dwyer, Richard's mother, told us last year, "They had two American guys with them, which Richard assumes were men from ICE. They questioned him about his website. It wasn't more than an hour. The ICE men shook his hand when they left," she said. "One of them said 'Don't worry, you won't have to go to America.'"

Richard, apparently realizing that his site had become a serious matter, took it down. A couple of computers were seized, and he hoped that would be the end of the matter.

It wasn't. He was asked to report to his local police station on May 23, 2011, where he found out what had happened: UK police had dropped their own investigation, but the US had requested O'Dwyer's extradition.

Such remedies are uncommon among all offenses; they are doubly so when it comes to copyright and computer cases. Such extraditions were nearly unheard of until the last year, when O'Dwyer and then Megaupload's Kim Dotcom both became extradition targets over copyright cases.

O'Dwyer's site was a "linking site" that did not host infringing content itself, and his lawyer compared it to Google, which also links to copyrighted content. TVshack did do things like show lists of the most clicked-on links (surprise: most were copyrighted TV shows), however, and the proportion of offending links appears to be much higher than at a search engine like Google. US lawyers argued that O'Dwyer had personally promoted links to infringing content, too.

Nexus

O'Dwyer's site did not appear to violate UK law, and O'Dwyer's servers weren't located in the US. This alone poses no problem to an extradition claim; courts have recognized for centuries that a person can't simply sit in another jurisdiction and direct a harm into another jurisdiction without penalty. But the general question raised in such cases is whether the alleged miscreant had a "nexus" with the target jurisdiction; had he put himself under its rule by choosing to transact business there? Or was the contact merely incidental and accidental?

A UK judge recently found a nexus. "There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O'Dwyer in the USA albeit by him never leaving the north of England. Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA," he ruled two months ago. (Julia O'Dwyer said that the judge lacked the "technical brains to know about the whole thing. That guy just lives and breathes extradition.")

But the final decision to proceed would be up to the Home Secretary, Theresa May. According a BBC "breaking news" tweet this morning, May has agreed to O'Dwyer's extradition despite a 20,000-person strong petition urging her to refuse consent.

O'Dwyer hasn't been to the US since he was five years old. One suspects he won't ever forget his return trip.