RIAA milestone: First criminal suit against MP3 trader could mean jail time
A member of Internet piracy group Apocalypse Production Crew (APC) under the handle Dextro (nee Barry Gitarts) has been found guilty of piracy, and now faces criminal charges of up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and more.
Gitarts, 25, was convicted of "conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement" and found guilty by a jury in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia yesterday for his 2003-2004 participation in a release group that provided pirated content on the Internet.
The group, Apocalypse Production Crew, had a server in a Texas facility that Gitarts paid for and administered. From there, the group hosted and traded "hundreds of thousands of copies" of pirated music, movies, software, and games.
In the ongoing campaign against piracy, there have been 15 criminal convictions against APC related to software piracy, part of 56 total during the Department of Justice's Operation FastLink, in which several "first release" groups were under FBI surveillance, and over 100 million dollars worth of pirated software and media were found and removed.
Jail terms for pirates have not been uncommon in the past, but the is the first criminal case over sharing music.
Last year, a man was sentenced to 46 months in prison for distributing faked certificates of authenticity for Microsoft software. A BitTorrent uploader last year could have faced a sentence exactly the same as Gitarts': up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, three years of supervised release and a "full restitution."
Gitarts will receive his sentence on August 8, 2008, and could become the first person to go to jail strictly for uploading music to the Internet.