The creators of the site with pirated Android applications face 5 years in prison

Two creators of a site with pirated Android apps have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement, writes Mashable. 26-year-old Nicholas Narbon and 21-year-old Thomas Dai were accused of involvement in the AppBucket website, through which more than a million counterfeit applications were distributed from August 2010 to August 2012.

AppBucket was an alternative Android app store that allowed users to download pirated versions of paid apps for free. The store generally copied Google Play, offering similar features such as update notifications, search, and lists of the best apps. The damage from distributing a million pirated applications through AppBucket was estimated at 700 thousand dollars.

The FBI shut down AppBucket and SnappzMarket, another similar pirate market, in August 2012. Prosecutors indicted Narbon, Giving and two others on January 24 this year. Now Narbon and Dai are facing five years in prison, meetings on their cases will be held on July 8 and June 12, respectively.

The damage from the activities of SnappzMarket is estimated at an even larger amount: $ 1.7 million, writes The Verge. However, the 22-year-old creator of this resource, Cody Peterson, is not mentioned in today's press release of the U.S. Justice Department, so the investigation is apparently still ongoing.

“Copyright infringement discourages smart, innovative people from using their talents to create something that the rest of society can use and enjoy,” says Georgia’s northern district attorney Sally Yates, “Theft is theft - regardless of whether it’s intellectual or material property - and we will continue to harass those who steal copyrighted material. ”