Man Who Stole 1,000 DVDs From Employer Strikes Plea Deal Over Movie Leaks (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0177858057
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/216216/man-who-stole-1000-dvds-from-employer-strikes-plea-deal-over-movie-leaks
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/man-who-stole-1000-dvds-from-employer-strikes-plea-deal-over-movie-leaks/
> An accused movie pirate who [1]stole more than 1,000 Blu-ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a [2]plea deal (PDF) this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man's piracy [3]cost movie studios millions . Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying" and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.
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> Among the popular movies that Hale is believed to have leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied "tens of millions of times" at an estimated loss of "tens of millions of dollars" for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The cops first caught wind of Hale's scheme in March 2022. They seized about 1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs in what [4]TorrentFreak noted were the days just "after the Spider-Man movie leaked online." It's unclear why it took close to three years before Hale's arrest, but TorrentFreak suggested that Hale's case is perhaps part of a bigger investigation into the Spider-Man leaks.
A plea deal for Hale significantly reduced the estimated damages from his piracy case to under $40,000 and led to the dismissal of two charges, though he still faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for one remaining copyright infringement charge. His final sentence and restitution amount will be decided at a court hearing in Tennessee at the end of August.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/man-who-stole-1000-dvds-from-employer-strikes-plea-deal-over-movie-leaks/
[2] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/US-v-Hale-Plea-Agreement-5-27-25.pdf
[3] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/03/07/2242250/feds-arrest-man-for-sharing-dvd-rip-of-spider-man-movie-with-millions-online
[4] https://torrentfreak.com/employee-pleads-guilty-in-spider-man-pre-release-piracy-case/
Would he steal a car? (Score:2)
It seems that he would steal a car. He should have watched this [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for that, I haven't seen IT Crowd in ages. Love that clip!
(and I would do most of those things - especially with the policeman's helmet)
Really? (Score:2)
This feels like a headline I should have read at least 15 years ago.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
If this guy was smart, he would have recorded them to VHS tapes, then no one would have known what to do.
Too far... way too far (Score:2)
I believe current copyright laws are on a a collision course with outright civil disobedience. Information is not just the battleground of the future, and fair use is being swept under the carpet under the heels of corporate content. And governments look the other way because controlling the information flow means everything. The balkanization of streaming services from the "Good ole days" of when Netflix had licenses to almost all existing content everywhere just exacerbates the problem and is beginning
Of Course (Score:2)
The FBI assuming, incorrectly, that each download equals a loss as always. The FBI wasted significantly more resources than any loss incurred by the studios for essentially no real payoff. Hell, just the court costs alone are more than any losses from pirating. Good ol' FBI wasting not only their own, but everyone else's involved, time.
Re: Of Course (Score:2)
He was making money selling rips of movies that weren't released yet. I don't really care if you sail the seas or not, this is a bit different.
Re: (Score:2)
I see no evidence to support the idea that he was making money off of the leaks (other than wages earn working for the manufacturing company). Even if he did make some extra money, I doubt it was worth anywhere near the amount wasted by the FBI, not including time and salaries.
Re: Of Course (Score:2)
Do you feel the same way about employers who fail to pay full wages to those working for them? Even if only amounts to hundreds or thousands of dollars, by the time the police investigate, DA prosecutes, and the court enforces the ruling- is it worth it? Probably to those who earned their money.
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The FBI assuming, incorrectly, that each download equals a loss as always
By your logic all the books AI keeps training on doesn't cost the authors anything.
Re: (Score:2)
No. Someone saying that it's not 1:1 is not the same as them claiming it is 0:1
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't. Nor can you effectively make the claim that it does. It may seem logical that if something can be obtained for free that everyone will try to get it for free, but that simply isn't true. Pay-what-you-can models work and tend to generate more money than setting the price yourself.
I don't give a flying fuck if ChatGPT is freely fed a copy of every single creative work in history, because it literally does not matter.
Re: (Score:2)
> Spoken like truly someone who has never produced anything of value in his whole life.
People not being able to sell their creative works because of a hypothetical market that prefers AI slop over human generated content isn't something copyright law was intended to prevent. In fact, even before AI, the whole "starving artist" stereotype exists because putting up some "art" up for sale does not necessarily mean anyone will be willing to pay for it.
Copyright law was intended to address exactly what happened here in the story we're discussing. Someone who didn't have the right to make and dis
Re: (Score:2)
> Thank god he didn’t steal classified documents and keep them in a country club full of foreign nationals
To be fair, Trump probably would've faced the music for this, had not a jury of 77,302,580 of his peers found him innocent. So, if the DVD pirate guy had run for president and won, he'd probably be able to make those pesky charges go away , too.
Come to think of it, I'd be okay with voting for a movie pirate, as long as he didn't run as a Republican.
That's Crazy (Score:2)
I think it's fair to call anyone who steals that many DVDs nuts.
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Or a pirate ... arrrrhhh
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Nuts. Probably.
Unless he stole over 1000 separate titles, or he was selling the physical discs, why so many? One each, per title. Rip them and sell on line. And his employer probably would never have caught on to the inventory loss. He's still exposed for the online sales if he wasn't really smart about covering his financial tracks. Which doesn't seem likely, given his high volume pilfering. So, nuts.
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Indeed. DVD is an obsolete optical data storage format.
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> I think it's fair to call anyone who steals that many DVDs nuts.
I think it's fair to call anyone who steals "Spider-Man: No Way Home" has no taste in movies.