George Bridi, Movie Piracy, New York 2022

A notorious international movie piracy ring has been dealt a major blow after one of its key members, George Bridi, a 52-year-old citizen of the United Kingdom, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement in a Manhattan federal court.

According to the investigation, Bridi was a member of the Sparks Group, a criminal organization that disseminated movies and television shows prior to their retail release date on the Internet. The group compromised the content’s copyright protections by making misrepresentations to wholesale distributors and using specialized software to crack or rip the discs.

The Sparks Group identified its reproductions by encoding the filenames of reproduced copyrighted content with distinctive tags and uploaded photographs of the discs in their original packaging to demonstrate that the reproduced content originated from authentic DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.

BRIDI arranged for discs to be picked up, mailed, or delivered from distributors located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey to other members of the Sparks Group prior to their official release date. He then reproduced, and aided and abetted the reproduction of, these discs by using computer software that circumvented copyright protections on the discs and reproducing the copyrighted content for further distribution on the Internet.

The Sparks Group has caused tens of millions of dollars in losses to film production studios.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams praised the outstanding investigative work of Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. He also thanked Europol and Eurojust as well as law enforcement authorities in Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Republic of Korea, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom for their assistance in the investigation.

BRIDI is scheduled to be sentenced on January 20, 2022, at 12:00 p.m. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

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