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Financial Fraud Law

IMAGiNE Member Guilty Of Copyright Infringement Conspiracy

A California man has pleaded guilty to conspiring to willfully reproduce and distribute tens of thousands of infringing copies of copyrighted works without permission, including infringing copies of movies before they were commercially released on DVD. 

The man, Sean M. Lovelady, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.  He faces up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and three years of supervised release. 
 
Lovelady was indicted last month, along with three other members of the IMAGiNE Group, which prosecutors characterize as “an organized online piracy group seeking to become the premier group to first release Internet copies of new movies only showing in theaters.”
 
According to court documents, Lovelady and his co-conspirators sought to illegally obtain and disseminate digital copies of copyrighted motion pictures showing in theaters.  Lovelady admitted that he went to movie theaters near his California residence and secretly used receivers and recording devices to capture the audio sound tracks of copyrighted movies (referred to as “capping”).  After obtaining, editing and filtering audio sound tracks and uploading them to servers utilized by the IMAGiNE Group, Lovelady used software to synchronize the audio file with an illegally obtained video file of a movie to create a completed movie file suitable for sharing over the Internet among members of the IMAGiNE Group and others, prosecutors say.

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