A Tennessee courtroom has sentenced a Memphis man who labored for a DVD and Blu-ray manufacturing and distribution firm to 57 months in jail for stealing and promoting digital copies of unreleased films.
37-year-old Steven R. Hale was charged in March with promoting ripped DVD and Blu-ray discs of films earlier than their launch. Prosecutors acknowledged on the time that Hale had stolen quite a few discs of films that have been being ready for industrial distribution in the USA between February 2021 and March 2022.
In Might 2025, Hale admitted to committing legal copyright infringement and agreed to totally compensate the victims, together with returning to his employer roughly 1,160 DVDs and Blu-rays that investigators had seized from him throughout searches.
Hale, a convicted felon with earlier armed theft prices, additionally pleaded responsible to unlawfully possessing a firearm discovered with one spherical within the chamber and 13 within the journal.
“The copyright proprietor misplaced tens of tens of millions of {dollars} because of Steven Hale stealing DVDs and Blu-rays of blockbuster films and promoting them earlier than their official scheduled launch dates,” mentioned FBI Particular Agent in Cost Joseph E. Carrico on Thursday.
Because the Justice Division revealed in March, Hale bought ripped variations of the stolen pre-release DVDs and Blu-rays by means of numerous e-commerce websites.
The listing of stolen film discs contains “Godzilla v. Kong,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Dune,” “F9: The Quick Saga,” “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” and “Black Widow.”
He was additionally accused of ripping the pre-release “Spider-Man: No Approach Dwelling” Blu-ray and sharing a digital copy extracted from it on-line, after bypassing the encryption stopping unauthorized copying.
“That digital copy was then illegally made out there over the web greater than a month earlier than the Blu-ray’s official scheduled launch date,” the Justice Division mentioned. “Copies of ‘Spider-Man: No Approach Dwelling’ have been downloaded tens of tens of millions of instances, with an estimated loss to the copyright proprietor of tens of tens of millions of {dollars}.”
In early March, prosecutors in New York charged two people employed by a third-party contractor for the StubHub on-line ticket market with profiting $635,000 from the resale of almost 1,000 stolen tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and numerous different occasions, such because the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, Ed Sheeran live shows, Adele live shows, and a number of NBA video games.
Twenty-year-old Tyrone Rose and 31-year-old Shamara Simmons, each workers of Sutherland World Providers in Jamaica, have been detained in New York Metropolis and at the moment are dealing with a potential most penalty of as much as 15 years behind bars.
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