FBI Busts '24' Bootlegger
In January of this year, Romero downloaded the first four episodes of this past season's '24' from an unspecified site and re-uploaded them to media-sharing site, LiveDigital.com. The episodes appeared on the site more than a week before the season's television debut. Fox called the FBI into the matter and Romero, coincidentally age 24, now finds himself facing up to three years in prison for, "uploading copyrighted material to a publicly accessible computer network knowing the work was intended for commercial distribution."
While Viacom's tact has been to sue the Web sites on which copyright violations appear (YouTube), Fox's pursuit of an individual user is reminiscent of the RIAA's strategy for fighting copyright violation (remember the poor little 12-year-old girl who got sued?). So, is the tide turning to putting copyright responsibility back in the hands of individual 'Netizens? Doubtful. We think it's more likely that Fox saw an easy target in Romero who was dumb enough to use a site that he was a registered user of, as opposed to something more anonymous, like BitTorrent.
From AOL News
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