EliteTorrents’ Admin Sentenced to 18 Months of Jail

There might be times when crime seems to pay, but when it doesn’t, you know it. As the admin of the BitTorrent tracker EliteTorrents found out, crime didn’t pay, and he’ll prove it by spending eighteen months in jail and also be $20,000 poorer (I’m unsure if he heard money off the site though, so this might not hurt as much as it seems).

The FBI and DoJ are certainly trying to prove something, but as sites get shut down, more just pop up, and it’s truly amazing to see. Despite the severe risk of being shut down and taken to court, some brave souls just don’t care, or love the rush.

In the UK, former admin of Oink was charged with “conspiracy to defraud”, whatever that means. A handful of uploaders were also charged on one count of uploading one disk. How much their fines will be, we don’t know. Oddly enough, it’s still legal to file swap in Canada, but I don’t expect that to last too much longer either. Pretty soon, we’ll all feel guilty for listening to the music or watching the movies we legally bought.

EliteTorrents’ rise to fame, and its subsequent demise, can be traced to a copy of “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith”, which the site pre-released approximately six hours prior to its theatrical premier. After attracting the attention of the MPAA, an investigation into the site by the FBI resulted in the site’s closure in May 2005 (“Operation D-Elite”), as well as the arrest of three administrators.