Three men face federal accusations of participating in an international piracy campaign that distributes popular movies and television shows online for their release dates, prosecutors announced Wednesday.
The men, who are accused of a conspiracy of copyright infringement, were accused of being members of the Sparks Group, a sophisticated piracy outfit across several continents.
One of the men, George Bridi, 50, from the United Kingdom, was arrested in Cyprus on Sunday. An American man, Jonathan Correa, 36, was arrested Tuesday in Olathe, Kan. Authorities are still searching for the third man, Umar Ahmad, 39, from Norway.
“The group has circumvented copyright protection on almost all films released by major production studios, such as television shows, and distributed them through a worldwide network of servers,” said Audrey Strauss, the United States’ acting attorney for the Southern District of New York. in a statement.
These charges are important, said Ernesto van der Sar, the founder of TorrentFreak, an outlet that has handled the piracy scene for years. “This is very high,” he said. “I think it haunts a lot of people because these people are generally very private and are good at hiding their identities.”
TorrentFreak reports that shortly before the charges were dropped, news of the arrests appeared to be circulating among elite members of the international piracy scene, and some of their servers – even those not directly affiliated with the Sparks Group – appeared to be shut down out of caution.
According to authorities’ statements, members of the Sparks Group fraudulently obtained DVDs and Blu-ray discs from wholesale distributors in New York and New Jersey, sometimes misrepresenting why they received the discs before the retail release date.
From 2011 to 2020, Mr Ahmad and Mr Bridi arranged for disks to be mailed or delivered to other members of the group, including Mr Correa, prosecutors said. The men were also accused of using software to circumvent copyright protection to distribute movies or television shows online.
The films and TV shows allegedly stolen by these suspects not only represent a body of work that has been broken off from those who have developed their craft and worked their way to stardom for years, but deprive the studios and actors of the fruits of their labor, “Philip R. Bartlett, the inspector-in-charge of the New York office of the United States Postal Inspection Service, said in the statement.
It was not immediately clear whether the two arrested men had lawyers.
Evan Greer, a deputy director at Fight for the Future, a non-profit digital rights organization, said she understood the importance of copyright laws, but doubted this kind of enforcement.
“What it does do is protect the profits of a small handful of large Hollywood institutions, and strengthen the monopoly power of companies like Apple, Netflix, Amazon and Google,” she said.
“In public libraries, we can share books, movies and music freely and without restriction,” she added. “The only reason that’s not true on the internet is because Hollywood and big record labels have lobbied furiously to make it illegal, instead of adapting their business models to the reality that the internet is here to stay.”
In the statement Wednesday, U.S. officials said they were working with Europol and law firms in 18 other countries to shut down servers that the piracy groups had used to share content. It added that the Sparks Group film production studios cost tens of millions of dollars.
The charges for copyright infringement, which carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison, were filed in January and sealed in New York on Tuesday. Mr Bridi was also charged with wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, and conspiracy to transport sets of property interstate, which carries a maximum penalty of five years.
