Extradited copyright infringer sentenced
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(InfoWorld) - The leader of one of the oldest and most widely recognized Internet software piracy groups was sentenced Friday to 51 months in prison on one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. Hew Raymond Griffiths, 44, was extradited to the U.S. from Australia in February, and in April, he pleaded guilty to two copyright-related charges in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. Griffiths, a British national, was the long-time leader of the DrinkOrDie software piracy network and an elder in the underground Internet piracy community, known as the warez scene, the DOJ said. He faced a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a US$500,000 fine for the charges. 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," Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general at the DOJ, said in a statement. Griffiths had fought extradition for almost three years, and he was held in an Australian detention center during that time. His extradition was one of the first for a copyright offense, the DOJ said in a press release. "Whether committed with a gun or a keyboard -- theft is theft," U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement. "And, for those inclined to steal Intellectual Property here, or from half-way around the world, they are on notice that we can and will reach them." DrinkOrDie was founded in Russia in 1993 and expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. The group was dismantled by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2001, with more than 70 raids conducted in the U.S. and five other countries, the U.K., Finland, Norway, Sweden and Australia. The operation targeting DrinkOrDie has resulted in more than 30 felony convictions in the U.S. and 11 convictions elsewhere, the DOJ said. The DOJ estimated that DrinkOrDie was responsible for the reproduction and distribution of more than $50 million worth of pirated software, movies, games and music. In a 1999 interview, Griffiths said he ran DrinkOrDie's day-to-day operations and controlled access to more than 20 top warez servers worldwide. He said then he would never be caught. DrinkOrDie specialized in cracking software codes and distributing the cracked versions over the Internet. The group distributed software from large companies such as Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and Symantec Corp., as well as smaller software vendors, the DOJ said. The group used encryption and other security measures to hide their activities from police.
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A Japanese court has convicted the inventor of popular file-swapping software for copyright violations but refused to jail the programmer, who has become a cyberspace icon.
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A Hollywood man accused  of using a video camcorder to record movies has been sentenced  to seven years in federal prison.
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A former council official is jailed for nine months for possession of more than 1,000 images of child pornography.
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A 26-year-old college student faces 15 years in prison as the first person convicted of software piracy stemming from April&#39;s international raids dubbed &quot;Operation Fastlink.
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A jailed man who told his family he was in Thailand is sentenced for keeping child pornography.
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A computer technician involved in a bid to extort $1.3 million from Tom Cruise for copies of the actor's stolen wedding photographs was sentenced on Thursday to two years probation.
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Two men from Belarus have been  extradited to the United States to face charges in a child  pornography case spanning the globe, the U.S. Immigration and  Customs Enforcement Bureau said on Tuesday.
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Actor Chris Langham is due to be sentenced for downloading indecent videos of children from the internet.
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LOS ANGELES  - A Hollywood man accused of using a video camcorder to record movies has been sentenced to seven years in federal prison.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. government employee who used his work computer to download child pornography for about 10 years was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said. Robert M. Carey, 52, had more than 1 million images of child pornography on his home and office computers, in photo albums, or on DVDs and CD-ROMs when law enforcement authorities searched his home and office in August 2005, the DOJ said. Carey, of Bowie, Maryland, was charged with producing and possessing child pornography. In addition to the jail sentence, Judge Roger W. Titus of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland ordered Carey to pay US$50,000 in restitution to a victimized family member, the DOJ said. Carey, an employee of the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) since 1974, took pictures of himself and a girl engaged in sexual acts when the victim was between the ages of eight and 13, the DOJ said. Some of those pictures were taken at the NOAA office, the DOJ said. Carey pleaded guilty to the charges in May. He fled the U.S. after his Dec. 21, 2005 indictment. He was featured on the television show "America's Most Wanted" on Jan. 21, and he was arrested on Jan. 24 after turning himself in to U.S. officials in Rome, Italy. Carey's sentencing came one day after a Wichita, Kansas, man was sentenced to 19 years in prison after sharing child pornography videos in a Yahoo Inc. chat room.
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A computer technician involved in a  bid to extort $1.3 million from Tom Cruise for copies of the  actor's stolen wedding photographs was sentenced on Thursday to  two years probation.
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TOKYO - A man arrested last year on copyright charges for disseminating films on the Internet was given a three-year suspended sentence Tuesday - averting a jail term in one of the first crackdowns on file-sharing in Japan.
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A convicted and registered offender writes in with his side of the story.
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A CHINESE UNIVERSITY student has been sentenced to a year in jail for flogging porn on the internet. According to the state Xinhua news agency, the 22 year-old student, identified only by his surname Xie, was
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LOS ANGELES: A Malaysian resident who ran a website which charged users to watch pirated films was ordered by a California court to pay US$23.8mil (RM90.4mil) to movie studios, the industry&#39;s trade group said on Tuesday.
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Two men have pleaded guilty to copyright-infringement for distributing music, software and movies over the Internet in the first U.S. convictions for piracy over "peer to peer" networks, the Justice Department said.