The Daily Swarm

The MPAA has won a jury conviction for criminal copyright infringement, opening the doors to many more cases like it in the future. A federal jury convicted 26-year-old Daniel Dove for both felony copyright infringement as well as conspiracy, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday. Dove, the last remaining administrator of EliteTorrents.com who did not plead guilty, now faces up to 10 years in prison.
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The case goes all the way back to 2005, when investigators raided EliteTorrents and shut the site down with the help of the MPAA. At the time, EliteTorrents was one of the most popular Bit Torrent trackers around and had gained notoriety for making available prerelease movies like Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Search warrants were served on 10 people in the US and the site admins immediately faced criminal charges.

Two administrators, Scott McCausland and Grant Stanley, pleaded guilty in 2006 in hopes of avoiding a jury trial. Stanley got the first sentencing of five months in jail along with a $3,000 fine. McCausland also ended up serving five months in prison before going on probation, part of which involved an odd request from his probation officer to start using Windows (instead of Linux) so that monitoring software could be installed on the machine. Dove was the last holdout, refusing to plead guilty and apparently hoping that the jury would throw him a bone when he finally went to trial.