By Stevie Smith Jun 26, 2007, 14:03 GMT
A British-born man has been hit with a 4 and a half-year jail term after pleading guilty in a US court to charges of piracy. Leader of the infamous DrinkOrDie group, Hew Griffiths and his band of software-cracking miscreants were responsible for the creation and distribution of some $50 million USD of pirated software, computer games, music, and movies.
Although DrinkOrDie was officially brought to its knees back in 2001 thanks to a series of focused raids executed under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of Justice – at which time Griffiths was living in Australia – it has taken more than half a decade to finally bring the group’s leader to justice.
Griffiths has been in official custody in Australia since 2004 and has been embroiled in a desperate struggle against extradition to the United States in order to face specific piracy charges related to the group’s illegal activities. The US extradition order aimed at Griffiths marks somewhat of a legal milestone as it exists as the very first to be lodged through an intellectual property crime, reports the BBC.
Despite the protracted proceedings involved in getting Griffiths out of Australia, which came to an end in February of 2007, he was this week sentenced in the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, to a total of 51 months on a charge of "conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement."
However, despite the eventual victory notched by the Department of Justice, it is believed that 44-year-old Griffiths will only serve a total of 15 months of incarceration having already spent the remainder of the sentence in an Australian jail between 2004 and the present day.
"Whether committed with a gun or a keyboard – theft is theft," commented US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg in a statement regarding the case.
In excess of 30 individuals have been thrown behind bars in direct connection to the actions of DrinkOrDie, which was first founded in 1993 and delivered illegal cracked copies of software and multimedia to those not willing to buy official retail products related to the likes of Adobe, Microsoft, Novell, Symantec, and various other manufacturers.
Griffiths’ lawyer, Nicholas Patrick, has revealed he is to assess his client’s exchange options so that he might serve the final 15 months of his sentence back in Australia.
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