During 2005, Federal Agents assisted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), first infiltrated and then shutdown EliteTorrents, a BitTorrent tracker with more than 130,000 members. In a May they took down the server and left this message, which was viewed more than 500,000 times in the week following the raid.

Daniel Dove, one of the arrested administrators of the Elitetorrents tracker initially opted for a ‘not guilty’ plea, but his gamble didn’t pay off. The jury was told that Dove was responsible for managing and recruiting the crucial ‘uploaders’ on the site (original seeders) and that he also operated a server which was used to distribute pirate material.

The jury believed this version of events and found Dove guilty on one count each of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement. Today, Dove has was sentenced to 18 months in prison, three years of supervised release and a $20,000 fine.

Dove is the only administrator of Elitetorrents to plead “not guilty”. In 2006, Scott McCausland pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement for his uploading of Star Wars: Episode III.

You can read the entire article at TorrentFreak.