A member of the pioneering warez group aPOCALYPSE pRODUCTION cREW (aPC) has been jailed for 18 months. Barry Gitarts, also known as ‘Dextro’, was sentenced after he was convicted of Conspiracy to Commit Criminal Copyright Infringement. Thus far, there have been 15 convictions of aPC members.
aPOCALYPSE pRODUCTION cREW (aPC) was a pioneering music piracy group, thought by many to be the first such outfit to leak pre-release mp3 files to the Internet in an organized manner. In his role as server administrator for the group, ‘Dextro’ is facing 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
This week, a 30 year old man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his involvement in the so-called pirate ‘warez scene’. In what appears to be some sort of bizarre parallel universe, it’s been revealed that another notorious pirate has an interesting job - he’s chairman of the San Diego Republican Party.
Five so-called ‘warez scene’ members have been indicted on charges of conspiring to commit copyright infringement. For the unauthorized sharing of tens of thousands of files, the men face five years in prison and fines of $250,000 on each count.
A 27 year old man has been sentenced to prison on one felony count of conspiracy to infringe copyright in his capacity as leader of the warez release group ‘MaGE’. On top of this he was also fined $5000 and ordered to serve 2 years supervised release.
A Georgia man is facing the prospect of years in prison and fines of $750,000 after he admitted being involved in the ‘camming’ of movies and removing ‘copyright management information’ from DVDs. The cost of removing management information from a DVD in the US? 5 years in prison, 2 more than for camming movies.
A large Polish pay-torrent site by the name of Torrenty.org recklessly exposed the IP addresses of its users, most of whom are thought to be sharing copyrighted files.
Trojan/Erazer-A is a new trojan that spreads through P2P networks. Apart from infecting your pc with malware and disabling anti-virus applications, it also actively deletes music, video’s and pictures from “shared folders’, used by p2p applications.
