The owner of a pirate website was sentenced to 87 months of prison in a Virginia court last Friday, making it the longest prison sentence for computer piracy in US courts. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III also ordered Nathan Petersen, 27, from Los Angeles, to pay back more than $5.4 million in restitution.
The case against Mr Petersen began to be built up in 2003, when his site offering pirated software first came to the attention of law enforcement authorities. The investigation lasted for several years until the pirate website was finally closed down in 2005. By then Nathan Petersen had already managed to achieve sales of $5.4 million and cause nearly $20 million in damages to the software industry. Petersen offered the software as supposedly legal “backup copies”, selling them on at hugely discounted prices. It is legal to produce and distribute backup copies for purchased software, but it is illegal to sell them on separately. This has prompted a warning from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) to consumers about buying software that may be advertised as legal but is in fact counterfeit.
According to a study of software piracy cases pursued by the FBI since 2000, the average pirate is a 35-year-old male from California. In all, the western state accounted for more than 34 percent of the 75 cases studied. However, piracy is something all age groups have been involved in: the youngest defendant in such a case was 19, while the oldest was 74. The average prison term received in software piracy cases was 22 months and the average damages to the software industry amount to a little over $9 million.
