Dave Horvath
20 Dec 2006 5:40
United States Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan has released a statement saying the 24 year old defendant Scott R. McCausland, one of three who operated a P2P network known as Elite Torrents has been sentenced to five months jail time and five months house arrest for providing illegal copyrighted material for download.
Part of a government agency sting operation codenamed D-Elite, the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigated and shut down their main website which was found to be a portal for file sharing copyrighted materials. The homepage of Elite Torrents was replaced with a message stating, "This Site Has Been Permanently Shut Down by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)". Within the first week, more than half a million page hits read that welcome message.
Elite Torrents had been known to be a valuable source of pre-release software, movies and games and was even noted for having the Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith movie some six hours before the first theatrical viewing. Consequently, the file they provided was downloaded over 10,000 times in the next 24 hours. United States District Judge Sean J. McLaughlin did not look upon this lightly and stated that online pirates, "are not modern day Robin Hood’s, but rather common thieves motivated solely by the desire to get something for nothing."
Source:
Department of Justice