PR Newswire, September 9 — Daniel Dove, 26, formerly of Clintwood, Va., was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge James P. Jones to 18 months in prison for his role as a high-ranking administrator of a peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet piracy group, Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich announced today. In addition, Dove was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and fined $20,000.
A jury found Dove guilty of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement on June 26, 2008. At trial, evidence was presented that proved Dove was an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, an Internet piracy site that, until May 25, 2005, was a source of infringing copyrighted works, specifically pre-release movies. Elite Torrents used BitTorrent P2P technology to distribute pirated works to thousands of members around the world. Evidence proved Dove was an administrator of a small but crucial group of Elite Torrents members known as “Uploaders,” who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group.
YouTube, for those few who don’t know, is a huge user-generated library of videos. Content placed on Youtube is scrutinized by the site to look for any copyright infringement and items are frequently taken down quickly if any question about their legitimacy is raised. Still, there is a great selection of things to watch, particularly music videos. Thanks to deals like the one they cut with Warner two years ago, quite a bit of it avoids copyright issues. [In a very recent development, Wayne Wang’s latest film, The Princess of Nebraska, will be released by Magnolia Pictures on October 17 as free content in YouTube’s “Screening Room.” —Ed.]
When it comes to downloading videos for a fee, there are always sites like Amazon and Netflix—which, in addition to its mail-order DVD rental business, also has a library of over ten thousand titles which you can watch streamed from their website; and that’s included in the cost of membership. It’s also possible to rent or buy movies and television shows through software like iTunes.
Given the size of most movie downloads, content providers are still working out ways to make the time it takes to get your movie more manageable and to avoid stuttering or buffering issues. This situation should improve as bandwidth becomes greater and software improves.
September 15th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
That’s quite a helpful guide. I knew something like Archive.org must exist, but I didn’t know where. The site is ideal for my style of music creation. Thanks!