A former employee of a multinational DVD company was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing hundreds of pre-release DVDs and Blu-rays and leaking blockbuster movies online, the Department of Justice confirmed Thursday.
Back in May, Steven Hale pleaded guilty to spending about a year between 2021 and 2022 stealing discs from his employer and selling them online through e-commerce sites. Among movies that Hale uploaded for illegal download were highly anticipated titles like Dune, as well as sequels to popular films like F9: The Fast Saga and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
But according to the DOJ, Hale did the most damage by leaking advance copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home. That particular movie, released exclusively in theaters in 2021, became the first movie after the COVID pandemic started to gross $1 billion at the box office. Likely DVD sales were expected to be just as explosive, but for many fans too cautious to return to movie theaters at the time, DVD leaks became too enticing to pass up. Hale wasn't the only one to recognize the high demand online, with illegal downloads of the movie becoming so widespread that ReasonLabs reported that scammers started planting malware in illegal copies of the movie to "lure in as many victims as possible."
It was in this climate that Hale bypassed DRM encryption, which prevents copying, to rip that movie from the Blu-ray disc, selling the high-quality leak online amidst a sea of inferior bootlegs, more than a month before fans could access it legally. Unsurprisingly, that DVD rip alone was "downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars," the DOJ said.
Hale, a 38-year-old with prior felony convictions for armed robbery, risked a potential sentence of 15 years for these crimes, but he reduced his sentence to a maximum of five years through his plea deal. At the time, the DOJ credited him for taking "responsibility," arguing that he deserved a maximum reduction partly because the total "infringement amount" was likely no more than $40,000, not the "tens of millions" the DOJ claimed in today's release.
Ultimately, Hale pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement, while agreeing to pay restitution (the exact amount is not clarified in the release) and return "approximately 1,160 stolen DVDs and Blu-rays" that the cops seized to his former employer. Hale also pleaded guilty to "being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm," the DOJ noted, after cops uncovered that he "unlawfully possessed a pistol that was loaded with one live round in the chamber and 13 rounds in the magazine."
Combining the DVD theft and firearm charges, the US District Court in Tennessee sentenced Hale to 57 months, just short of the five-year maximum sentence he could have faced.
In the DOJ's press release, acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti claimed the win, while warning that "today’s sentencing signals our commitment to protecting American innovation from pirates that would exploit others’ work for a quick profit, which, in this case, cost one copyright owner tens of millions of dollars.”
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