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Four administrators of a torrent website were recently sentenced of up to four and a half years in the United Kingdom. They are known for releasing torrents for a number of movies even before it is officially out in the movie theaters.
The said site operators are Steven Pegram, Mark Rollin, Paul Taylor, and Alan Stephenson who all pleaded guilty, according to TorrentFreak. The same report noted that the group uploaded movies like “Expendables 3” to a “relatively low-profile” torrent website. However, they attracted a high-profile lawsuit from the movie’s distributor, Lionsgate, for making the said movie available online several weeks before the official premiere date Aug. 15, 2014, in the United States.
The release of “Expendables 3” torrent was reported in late July 2014. According to Variety, the file was downloaded for more than 189,000 times within a day. With weeks left before the premiere, the said number of downloads was expected to go higher by the millions.
“Expendables 3” was a major project that reportedly had a budget of somewhere between $90 million to $100 million. It had a star-studded cast including Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Jason Statham, Harrison Ford, Antonio Banderas, Terry Crews, Jet Li, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and more. About a week after the movie’s torrent was dropped, Lionsgate filed a lawsuit against 10 “John Does.”
IPPro Magazine reports that local authorities referred to the team of torrent site administrators as an “incredibly organized group.” “Piracy is never a victimless crime. Film companies invest considerable sums of money to produce high-quality motion picture films. Creative companies rely on this revenue stream to fund jobs within the industry. This type of crime threatens the future of both,” said London Police’s detective constable Mark Baker.
Hollywood studios and movie producers have been on a long-running battle with the torrent industry. Despite efforts to minimize the latter’s operations, the torrent community still sees significant breakthroughs from time to time. Just earlier this month, torrent users got excited when a 4K WEB-DL file of the movie “Aquaman” was released online. Many speculated that might have meant that the iTunes encryption was already breached.
