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Prison Time For Elite Torrent Tracker
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-10-27
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Grant Stanley picked up a five-month prison sentence for his role in creating EliteTorrents, a BitTorrent tracker site that had been one of the most heavily used in the world.
 | | "...And Justice For All" |  |
The TorrentFreak blog noted Stanley's prison sentence will be followed by five months of home detention. He also has to pay a $3,000 fine, and will be on supervised release for three years.
Stanley's conviction happened as a result of a federal investigation of EliteTorrents dubbed Operation D-Elite. A Department of Justice statement on the case noted Stanley was one of three defendants convicted to date for his role in the case.
DOJ also cited "substantial assistance" provided by the Motion Picture Association of America for the investigation.
The statement from DOJ described the EliteTorrents operation:
At its prime, the Elite Torrents network attracted more than 133,000 members and facilitated the illegal distribution of more than 2 million copies of movies, software, music, and games.
The Elite Torrents P2P network offered a virtually unlimited content selection, including illegal copies of copyrighted works before their availability in retail stores or movie theatres.
Notice the use of the phrase "facilitated the illegal distribution" in the statement. EliteTorrents did not host the allegedly pirated material, but provided trackers to others to obtain the desired content.
That was enough to mobilize a massive effort by several federal and state agencies against the site and its operators. We have to wonder now if such an effort will be used against other sites that could be seen as facilitating similar services.
Here is a search query that uncovered content indexed and pointed to by a certain well-known search engine. The search engine does not host the content, but provides pointers to these files.
Will the feds target that search engine next?
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Tags: Grant Stanley, Elite Torrents
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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