The FBI arrested one of the participants in the leak of dozens of pre-release films in DVD quality

Remember the December post, “ Dozens of pre-release films in DVD quality leaked to the Internet ”? It would be naive to believe that Hollywood studios, copyright holders and pirate fighters will leave everything as it is and will not look for the culprits. Many are engaged in their search, including the FBI. And the first results of such active work have already appeared: a 31-year-old man from Lancaster is arrested, who is accused of downloading copies of "Survivor" and "Snoopy and trifle pot-bellied in the movie" on the private tracker "Pass The Popcorn".

Let me remind you that in December last year a large number of films in DVD quality hit the Web, and the number of downloads of these films reaches many millions of copies. At the same time, screeners hit the Internet even before pre-release viewing.

Kyle Moriarty (not professor, no) from Lancasterfound guilty of copying the screeners of the above two films. He did this while working in one of the studios. Both copies were uploaded to PTP (Pass The Popcorn), a private BitTorrent tracker, from where movies were distributed all over the Internet. Moriarty has already entered into a pre-trial agreement with the plaintiffs, pleading guilty.

Moriarty first copied the films to a USB flash drive, and went home with them. After decoding the releases, he uploaded them to the mentioned tracker. Films have been downloaded several million times, which allows us to talk about huge amounts of lost profits for movie studios. Fox estimates its losses at a minimum of $ 1.12 million.

In court documents, Moriarty’s employer is not indicated, but there is evidence, allowing us to say that he worked in the show “Dr. Phil ”(production coordinator), which means it is related to the Paramount studio.

As far as you can understand, Moriarty uploaded movies from his home IP without using encryption, proxies, or anything else. According to these data, it was discovered. As for the group Hive-CM8, which organized the leak of a much larger number of films, the man has nothing to do with it. The “Survivor” hit the Net only thanks to Moriarty, the Hive-CM8 had nothing to do with it.

Thanks to the conclusion of pre-trial detention, Moriarty expects a sentence with the maximum punishment in the form of a three-year prison sentence. The sentence should be imposed over the next few months.