The last defendant from the "Operation Higher Education" and "Operation Safehaven" anti-warez cases has pleased guilty in the U.S. District Court of Connecticut.
Greg Hurley, an Orlando, FL resident, pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement, and admitted he was a supplier for a warez network that offered thousands of illegal copies of software, digital music files, movies and video games.
Similar to 18 other defendants sentenced, Hurley will likely receive court supervised probation, and won’t serve any jail time. He was a member of Fairlight, an online group that was first targeted more than five years ago. The U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) worked alongside the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.
Even though members were located across the country, prosecution took place in Connecticut.
After Hurley, and other "suppliers" got access to content, "crackers" were responsible for breaking digital copyright protections before "couriers" distributed the cracked content to FTP servers.
"I had access to numerous FTP sites where titles were stored and downloaded," Hurley wrote as part of his guiilty plea. "I also conspired with others that uploaded copywrited [sic] works to FTP sites that would otherwise be further accessed, reproduced, and distributed by other co-conspirators."
Hurley is scheduled to be sentenced sometime this spring.
U.S. authorities have taken a stronger stand against online piracy rings, with many pirates now serving federal jail time for their participation in organized piracy.
3 Comments
Interesting to see how involved the U.S. government has become when dealing with organized piracy rings operating within the United States.
- guest
- Posts: 15288
- Posted on: 05 Feb 09 20:45
When dealing with movies, the first wrong is the fact Hollywood keeps trying to nickel and dime everyone. They do this by releasing movies on dvds, then re-releasing, then re-re-releasing them..etc. THEN, after you spend all your hard earned money on all these dvds, they say this: Hey, guess what...we've got a new format for you to RE-BUY all your same old movies over again.
So people probably say, why spend all this money, when I can pirate it all, and say screw you to the Movie Studios......
This next part is off topic...but....looking forward, one would wonder why buy movies in Blu-ray, when in 10 years, another new movie format will probably be out. This is why Streaming media is the future. (where you pay a monthly fee to access whatever you want, whenever you want) It is the future because you don't have to buy movies individually, and when they decide to up the quality, you get that upgrade for free.
Music Industry: Reasons for pirating music is waaay toooo easy to justify...lol. Before Napster, the music companies ripped off consumers by charging over $20 per cd. Now, no one has sympathy for them. Not only were they screwing over the consumer, now, I believe, they are STILL super-screwing over the artists themselves. You know all that money they get from lawsuits, NOT ONE artist has seen a dime from any of that money they got.
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