Daniel Dove is the first person ever to be convicted by a jury in the US for using BitTorrent to illegally distribute copyrighted material.
Several months ago I mentioned how 26yo Daniel Dove had become the eighth person to have been successfully targeted as part of the Department of Justice’s "Operation D-Elite," which so far has resulted in the convictions of seven former leading members of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker site. Fellow admins Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley, Sam Kuonen, and Scott Harvanek all plead guilty to similar copyright infringement charges rather than take their cases to trial.
On June 27th, 2008 a federal jury in Big Stone Gap, Va., convicted Dove, formerly of Clintwood, Va., on one count each of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement making him the first person ever to be convicted after a trial by jury in the US for using BitTorrent to engage in criminal copyright infringement. He faced as much as 10yrs in prison.
The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of the site’s "Uploaders," who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. The evidence showed that Dove recruited members who had very high-speed Internet connections, usually at least 50 times faster than a typical high-speed residential Internet connection, to become Uploaders. The evidence also showed that Dove operated a high-speed server, which he used to distribute pirated content to the Uploaders.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich then announced yesterday that he had been formally sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge James P. Jones to 18 months in prison for "…his role as a high-ranking administrator of a P2P Internet piracy group." In addition, Dove was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and fined $20,000.
At its height, EliteTorrents attracted more than 125,000 members and distributed about 700 movies, which were downloaded a total of 1.1 million times.
jared@zeropaid.com
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Anyone have any stats re how many of these cases are pending at any one time? At what level do the Feds decide to move in and make an arrest?
@open
I dont think the Feds would ever divulge pending cases and as for this it’s part of “Operation D-Elite” which was created specifically to target EliteTorrents after the whole Star Wars 3 leak (it appeared there first).