Hard Time —

US piracy cyberlocker operator gets 3 years in prison, must pay $100k

Files would be replaced with "different links to the very same infringing files."

A 23-year-old North Carolina man was sentenced (PDF) to three years in prison Tuesday and ordered to pay $100,000 in fines and restitution following a conviction of criminal copyright infringement for operating the RockDizMusic.com piracy site and cyberlocker.

The authorities said that the amount of pirated material on servers that defendant Rocky Ouprasith maintained in France and the Netherlands was valued at $6 million. Ouprasith pleaded guilty (PDF) in August and admitted that he largely ignored takedown requests for files on the RockDizMusic.com and RockDizFile.com sites.

The government said:

According to admissions made in connection with his guilty plea, between May 2011 and October 2014, Ouprasith operated RockDizMusic.com, a website originally hosted on servers in France and later in Canada, from which Internet users could find and download infringing digital copies of popular, copyrighted songs and albums. Ouprasith admitted that he obtained digital copies of copyrighted songs and albums—including “pre-release” songs that were not yet commercially available to consumers—from online sources and encouraged and solicited others, referred to as “affiliates,” to upload digital copies of copyrighted songs and albums to websites, including RockDizFile.com, that were hosted on servers in Russia, France, and the Netherlands, and that hosted hyperlinks to content being offered for download on RockDizMusic.com. Ouprasith further admitted that to encourage such activity, he agreed to pay the affiliates based on the number of downloads from his website.

The service was shuttered last year. The defendant faced a maximum of five years in prison when he was sentenced by US District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith in the Eastern District of Virginia.

According to court documents, (PDF) RockDizMusic had 1,652,253 site visits in January, 2014. The documents show that he "sometimes pretended" to comply with Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices by temporarily removing links to the infringing content "but soon thereafter posted new and different links to the very same infringing files."

Channel Ars Technica