6th EliteTorrents Star-Wars Pre-Release Guilty Plea

Written by enigmax on May 02, 2007 

Another uploader to the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and criminal copyright infringement of a pre-commercial release work. Getting involved in the pre-release of Star-Wars Ep III could land him 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

FBI

Defendant number six in the ongoing EliteTorrents prosecution drama has pleaded guilty according to an announcement made by Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Gregory A. White for the Northern District of Ohio.

Scott D. Harvanek, aged 22 of Tucson, Arizona, has pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and actual criminal copyright infringement. The charges relate to the seeding or to the conspiracy to seed ‘a pre-commercial release work’, likely to be Star Wars: Episode III, in violation of the Family Entertainment Copyright Act.

Harvanek’s guilty plea is the 6th arising from Operation D-Elite, which shut down the EliteTorrents network in May 2005. Previous convictions including those of Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley and Sam Kuonen.

Harvanek, who faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, is due to be sentenced July 23rd 2007.

Previously: Multiple Vulnerabilities Discovered in Ktorrent

Next: Vigilante Group Threatens P2P Lawsuit Lawyer

12 Responses

1 May 02, 2007 at 19:50 by corey

good luck scott, youve done nothing wrong!

2 May 02, 2007 at 20:09 by Arqentus

“five years in prison and a $250,000 fine”.

Hmmm, isent that the same amount of time you get for theft ( physical ) & things like rape… Somehow there seem to be a rather strange logic in sentence duration used … Hell, in my country the maximum you can get for murder is 30 years ( and not even a fine 1/10 of that amount ). And you can get off 1/3th sentence served.

This seems nuts …

3 May 02, 2007 at 23:27 by Kevin

When you make generous campaign contributions to Congressmen they’ll write anything into law that you like,

From yesterday’s Digg slapfest over the HD DVD key
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/0235228
it’s clear people have had enough. Let the revolution begin!

I suggest we stop bitching about the DMCA as nameless legislation, and bitch about the Congressmen who sponsored it. Unfortunately Wikipedia says it was unananimous, but you can start with the moneyman who introduced it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Coble

4 Jan 12, 2008 at 00:28 by Google

I Think,İt is very nice information…

Hitchhiker Nation

5 Feb 12, 2008 at 04:24 by Heidi

IDEA: How about you start releasing the movie as soon as it’s available? Or hell, put it out on DVD or allow people to *buy* it from the ‘net the same day it goes to theaters?

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