Digital Rights/Piracy

EliteTorrents Admin Risks 10 Years in Jail

Daniel Dove from Clintwood, Virginia trialled for online piracy

By George Craciun, Security News Editor

1st of July 2008, 07:21 GMT

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Daniel Dove is a 26 year old guy from Virginia who spends his time working as an upload administrator for popular tracker EliteTorrents. He was taken into custody after Operation D-Elite (that's what the FBI dubbed it), trialled in a court of law and found guilty of copyright infringement. Although the sentence will be issued on the 9th of September,

Dove could spend the next 10 years in incarceration. Two other admins were taken into custody, Scott McCausland and Grant Stanley, but they were given a 10 month sentence (5 months in jail and another 5 months of house arrest) and a $3,000 fine after pleading guilty as charged.

For two years, from 2003 until 2005, EliteTorrents ranked at the top of the list in terms of tracker popularity. According to the US Department of Justice the tracker had at one time 125,000 members and all of them downloaded over 700 movies not once or twice, but in excess of 1 million times. Movies that hadn't been released yet, such as "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith", could be downloaded off the tracker. This particular movie for example, which the tracker made available to its members hours before its official release, was the reason why FBI chose to crack down on EliteTorrents as opposed to other trackers.

The US Department of Justice issued this statement: "The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as "Uploaders," who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. The evidence showed that Dove recruited members who had very high-speed Internet connections, usually at least 50 times faster than a typical high-speed residential Internet connection, to become Uploaders. The evidence also showed that Dove operated a high-speed server, which he used to distribute pirated content to the Uploaders."

TAGS:

online piracy | torrents | copyright infringement

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