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"Star Wars" Pirates Nabbed
The dark side has again been thwarted.
Federal authorities on Tuesday charged eight people in California with illegally copying Star Wars: Episode III--Revenge of the Sith and distributing it over the Internet.
The band of pirates allegedly pilfered a screener copy of George Lucas' final Star Wars prequel from a post-production house in Lakewood, California, where one of the defendants worked. A day before the movie's worldwide bow, the group manufactured bootlegs and made a copy available for download on the Web, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.
The 28-year-old employee, Albert Valente, has agreed to plead guilty next month to misdemeanor copyright infringement for swiping the screener from the facility, prosecutors say.
Six others alleged accomplices were rung up on similar copyright infringement charges, which carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison, for copying and disseminating the Star Wars screener purportedly obtained by Valente.
Another defendant, Marc Hoaglin, 36, of Huntington Beach, California, faces one felony count of uploading a movie to the Internet. That charge carries a maximum three-year jail term if he's convicted.
All eight have been issued summons and are expected to appear in court next month.
The charges are welcome news for Hollywood. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, movie piracy has cost studios upwards of $3.5 billion a year in lost revenue and threatens the financial viability of the film distribution system, as new technologies like BitTorrent have made it easier for people to swap films online.
The Sith case is the latest in a high-profile crackdown.
In a separate case, the federal prosecutors charged 37-year-old Ronald Redding of Linthicum Heights, Maryland, with misdemeanor copyright infringement for allegedly giving a screener copy of last year's Best Picture winner, Million Dollar Baby, to a friend.
According to U.S. Attorney spokesman Thom Mrosek Redding plans to plead guilty. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently instituted rules asking members to sign a release promising to safeguard the copies or risk losing their membership. No immediate word on whether Redding has been booted from the Academy.)
Then there's 43-year-old Eric Wright of Bellflower, California. He pleaded guilty on Tuesday to one count of trafficking in counterfeit DVD labels for such hits as The Incredibles and Friday Night Lights, as well as manufacturing and selling illegal copies of those copyrighted movies. Sentencing is set for Dec. 12; Wright could face up to five years behind bars.
Last year, an Illinois man, Russell Sprague, went to jail after pleading guilty to illegally distributing more than 200 bootleg copies of Oscar screeners, including Something's Gotta Give and Seabiscuit. The man who loaned him the tapes, actor Carmine Caridi, was subsequently stripped of his Academy membership.
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