14 DAY TRIAL // The famous software pirate DrinkOrDie was sentenced to 51 months in prison for distributing almost any type of pirated material including applications, games, music and videos. Hew Griffiths, 44 year old, pleaded guilty last year, and was extradited to Australia, his mother country. As Ars Technica reported, the pirate earned approximately $50 million for the content distributed in the entire world, most of its clients being individual users who didn't buy the product from the original producer.
"From his home in Australia, Griffiths became one of the most notorious leaders of the underground Internet piracy community by orchestrating the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in copyrighted material," said Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher in a statement according to the same source.
DrinkOrDie, also known as DoD, is a software piracy group that cracked almost any type of digital content and distributed it on the Internet. The entire gang was founded in 1993 in Moscow and after only two years, it was a worldwide piracy network known as the group that released Windows 95 two weeks before Microsoft officially launched it.
DoD was discovered and busted by the authorities in 2001 when several members were arrested and convicted for all their past illegal activities. After almost 8 years of software cracking, DrinkOrDie remained in history for causing up to $500 million damages to the affected software companies.
However, it seems that the members of the group are not the only people affected by the recent investigations as the authorities are trying to discover the individual users who took pirated software from DoD. "Whether committed with a gun or a keyboard -- theft is theft," said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg according to Digital Media Wire. "And, for those inclined to steal Intellectual Property here, or from halfway around the world, they are on notice that we can and will reach them."