The 29 year-old operator of multiple video Web sites has pleaded guilty to charges of criminal copyright infringement that yielded $8 Million. He had also under-reported his income by more than $4.4 million and evaded payment of nearly $2 millon in taxes.
The infringing Web sites offered pirated video programming to consumers under a subscription model.
Sentencing will take place in February 2020 in US District Court. He faces a sentence of up to five years in prison, $250,000 fines and three years of supervised release for each charge. He also has agreed to pay $667,557 to the Motion Picture Association and nearly $3.4 million to the IRS, including penalties and interest.
Read the press release from the US Attorney’s office
A lot of the news coverage published by Piracy Monitor is about arrests and court decisions against video pirates. This may give the impression that piracy is a problem that has been solved.
In reality, this situation is more like the tip of the iceberg, and most instances of theft and redistribution will remain unknown unless content owners and distributors acknowledge the problem, unless advertisers police their automated placements more pro-actively, and consumers are better informed about the risks.
These piracy issues came up in multiple sessions at the Parks Associates Future of Video conference, which is the subject of a separate article here on Piracy Monitor.
