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UK National Busted for Pirating Hollywood Hits
A British national, George Bridi, has been extradited to the US and charged with participating in an international piracy ring that distributed movies and TV shows online without permission.
According to the allegations, Bridi was a member of the Sparks Group, a criminal organization that disseminated copyrighted content on the internet prior to its retail release date. The group, which operated between 2011 and the present, allegedly compromised the copyright protections on discs and reproduced and encoded the content in a format that could be easily copied and disseminated over the internet.
The Sparks Group identified its reproductions by encoding the filenames of reproduced copyrighted content with distinctive tags, and also uploaded photographs of the discs in their original packaging to demonstrate that the reproduced content originated from authentic DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.
The group’s activities caused tens of millions of dollars in losses to film production studios. On August 26, 2020, in coordination with law enforcement authorities in 17 countries and supported by Eurojust and Europol, dozens of servers controlled by the Sparks Group were taken offline around the world.
Codefendants Jonatan Correa, a/k/a “Raid,” and Umar Ahmad, a/k/a “Artist,” were also involved in the scheme. Correa previously pled guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and was sentenced to three years and three months of supervised release, with the first three months to be served in community confinement. Ahmad remains at large.
U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said, “As alleged, George Bridi was a member of an international video piracy ring that circumvented copyright protections on nearly every movie released by major production studios, as well as television shows, and distributed them worldwide on the Internet. Thanks to the assistance of our law enforcement partners, the piracy ring has been busted and Bridi is now in U.S. custody.”
Bridi will be presented and arraigned today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman.
Key Facts
- State: New York
- Category: Cybercrime
- Source: DOJ Press Release â†â€â€
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