Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement; The Register, November 18, 2022

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle, The Register ; Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement

"Two Russian nationals accused of operating Z-Library – one of the largest online book piracy websites – have been charged with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering.

According to a newly unsealed indictment, 33-year-old Anton Napolsky and 27-year-old Valeriia Ermakova, both of St Petersburg, Russia, operated the site between January 2018 and November 2022, allowing people to freely download pirated books and academic papers.

The duo "did knowingly and willfully infringe a copyright for purposes of commercial advantage and private financial gain" by distributing copyrighted works "having a total retail value of more than $2,500," according to the court documents [PDF].

They were arrested on November 3 in Cordoba, Argentina, at the request of the United States. Around the same time, the Feds also took down Z-Library's network of nearly 250 domains and seized its assets – much to the dismay of students everywhere who used the site to access textbooks and academic journals without paying the hefty price tags charged by academic publishers."

Hacker Who Stole IDs and Scripts From Celebrities Pleads Guilty; New York Times, 5/9/16

Benjamin Weiser, New York Times; Hacker Who Stole IDs and Scripts From Celebrities Pleads Guilty:

"Mr. Knowles said that it was difficult to go after “a high profile celebrity,” so he would begin by going after friends found in photographs with them. He would then hack the friends’ accounts to find the celebrities’ telephone numbers and other personal information.

“It boils down to the weakest link in the chain,” a former official of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Austin P. Berglas, told The New York Times in December, after the charges were announced.

At one point, the complaint said, Mr. Knowles showed the undercover agent a list of names, with phone numbers or email addresses of about 130 celebrities.

Mr. Knowles, in court, apologized to the judge, Paul A. Engelmayer, and acknowledged that he knew his actions had been wrong and illegal.

He pleaded guilty to both of the counts charged in a federal indictment against him: criminal copyright infringement and identity theft.

He could face a total of 10 years in prison when he is sentenced on Aug. 25. The federal sentencing guidelines, which are only advisory, suggested a sentence of 27 to 33 months, according to the plea agreement in the case."

The Unrepentant Bootlegger; New York Times, 9/27/14

Jenna Wortham, New York Times; The Unrepentant Bootlegger:

"To the government, Ms. Beshara was a thief, plain and simple. The Motion Picture Association of America alerted the federal government to NinjaVideo and nine other movie-streaming sites, and they all went dark at the same time. The raids were carried out by several federal agencies working to combat counterfeiting and piracy, and the scale of the operation was meant to send a warning that the government wasn’t ignoring the freewheeling world of illegal online streaming and downloading.

Ms. Beshara, however, still can’t accept that what she was doing deserved the heavy hammer of the law. She served 16 months in prison for conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, but she still talks about NinjaVideo as something grand. It was a portal that spirited her away from the doldrums of her regular life as a receptionist living with her parents to an online community that regarded her as its queen. Sure, she showed movies that were still playing in theaters, but it seemed like harmless, small-stakes fun.

“In hindsight — I know it’s naïve — but I never imagined it going criminal,” she said. “It didn’t seem like it was something to be bothered with. Even if it is wrong.”

She is not the only one who feels that way. It has proved very difficult to reverse a pervasive cultural nonchalance about what constitutes intellectual property theft on the web. Despite the government crackdown in 2010 and subsequent efforts to unplug websites that host or link to illegal content, new sites have emerged that filled the void that NinjaVideo left behind.

Online piracy is thriving. File-sharing, most of it illegal, still amounts to nearly a quarter of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index. And a recent report from Tru Optik, a media analytics firm, said that nearly 10 billion movies, television shows and other files, including games and pornography, were downloaded globally in the second quarter of 2014. Tru Optik estimates that about 6 percent of those downloads were legal. In July, a high-quality version of “The Expendables 3,” the Sylvester Stallone action comedy film, surfaced online and was downloaded millions of times, well before its release in theaters."