Fast & Furious 6 Pirate Sentenced to 33 Months Prison

[Ernesto]

During May 2013, TorrentFreak received an email from an individual in the UK who detailed serious problems he’d experienced in the preceding days.

On May 23 at 07:30, five unmarked cars containing 10 police officers and representatives from the Federation Against Copyright Theft tried to apprehend the man at this former address. That error was quickly corrected and within minutes three cars, four detectives and two FACT officers had made it to the correct location.

The police were looking for Philip Danks, a man from Walsall in the West Midlands. Their information was that the then 24-year-old had cammed Fast and Furious 6 at the local Showcase cinema before uploading it to the Internet.

“I was detained for 3 hrs 12 minutes, out of that I was questioned for approximately 40 minutes,” Danks told TorrentFreak at the time. “One police officer and two FACT officers conducted the interview. The police officer sat back and let FACT do all the questioning, so FACT were running the show.”

Danks was eventually released, but in September police were back, this time arresting both his sister and her former boyfriend. New allegations were made, this time in respect of the unauthorized camming and uploading of the movie ‘Epic’.

In March this year Danks told TF that the police weren’t going to take any action against him. However, after previously keeping us updated, Danks went quiet. Today his fate has been revealed.

Following a trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court, Danks was sentenced to 33 months in prison for recording, uploading and also selling physical copies of Fast and Furious 6.

In Court it was claimed that Danks’ uploading of Fast 6 resulted in more than 700,000 downloads costing Universal Pictures and the wider industry millions of pounds in losses.

It appears that Danks was also very easy to trace. When he contacted TF last year his email address betrayed his online nickname – ‘TheCod3r’ – a handle that is now easily linked to a KickassTorrents upload of the same movie. FACT say it was this username that led them to Danks.

Comments left by TheCod3r on KickassTorrents

While 33 months is no doubt an extremely harsh sentence, there were important aggravating factors. FACT report that following his arrest in 2013, Danks continued to both sell and distribute illegal copies of movies. He was assisted with uploading by Michael Bell, his sister’s former boyfriend. The Court sentenced Bell to a 12 month community order with 120 hours unpaid work.

Both pleaded guilty to committing offenses under the Fraud Act 2006 and the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. 

Kieron Sharp, Director General of FACT said that his organization is grateful to West Midlands Police for their assistance in bringing Danks and Bell to justice.

“This is an important case and an important sentence. Danks was responsible for recording, uploading and distributing the film and was clearly unconcerned at the time about the consequences of his actions, perhaps believing that the internet gave him anonymity. We at FACT have shown that we will find and identify people committing criminal offenses and ensure that they are properly dealt with through the courts,” Sharp said.

The MPAA’s Chris Marcich said that holding pirates to account is vital if the creative industries are to flourish alongside the development of legal services.

“It is important that those making money on the back of other people’s hard work and creativity, paying nothing back into the creative economy, are held accountable and we welcome today’s verdict,” Marcich said.

“This is one important element of the wider strategy to tackle this issue which also includes educating consumers about legitimate online sources of content through schemes like Creative Content UK, working with advertiser and payment processors to cut off the revenue streams pirate sites rely on and blocking illegal sites through the courts.”

Yet again FACT have another very big headline under their belt which will prove useful in their quest to deter those contemplating a similar course of action to Danks. As previously noted, camming on its own is not considered an offense, but couple it with distribution and selling copies for profit and things can get very serious indeed.

Originally Published: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 19:08:31 +0000
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[stormium]

The MPAA’s Chris Marcich said that holding pirates to account is vital if the creative industries are to flourish alongside the development of legal services.

congratulations chris, you have both made my skin crawl and reaffirmed my long held speculation that your organization is parasitic in nature and only exists to serve itself.

[Ernesto]

Last year, Philip Danks, a man from the West Midlands, UK, went into a local cinema and managed to record the movie Fast and Furious 6. He later uploaded that content to the Internet.

After pleading guilty, this week Wolverhampton Crown Court sentenced him to an unprecedented 33 months in prison.

The Federation Against Copyright Theft are no doubt extremely pleased with this result. After their successful private prosecution, the Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group is now able to place Danks’ head on a metaphorical pike, a clear warning to other would-be cammers. But just how difficult was this operation?

There’s often a lot of mystery attached to the investigations process in a case like this. How are individuals like Danks tracked and found? Have FACT placed spies deep into file-sharing sites? Are the authorities sniffing traffic and breaking pirates’ VPN encryption?

Or are they spending half an hour with Google and getting most of it handed to them on a plate? In Danks’ case, that appears to be exactly what happened.

Something that many millions of people use online is a nickname, and Danks was no exception. His online alias in the torrenting scene was TheCod3r, and as shown below it is clearly visible in the release title.

The idea behind aliases is that they provide a way to mask a real name. Military uses aside, adopting an alternative communications identity was something popularized in the 70s with the advent of Citizens Band radio. The practice continues online today, with many people forced to adopt one to register with various services.

However, what many in the file-sharing scene forget is that while aliases on a torrent site might be useful, they become as identifying as a real name when used elsewhere in ‘regular’ life. The screenshot below shows one of Danks’ first huge mistakes.

Clicking that link on dating site Plenty of Fish (POF) reveals a whole range of information about a person who, at the very least, uses the same online nickname as Danks. There’s no conclusive proof that it’s the same person, but several pieces of information begin to build a picture.

In his POF profile, Danks reveals his city as being Willenhall, a small town situated in an area known locally as the Black Country. What FACT would’ve known soon after the movie leaked online was which cinema it had been recorded in. That turned out to be a Showcase cinema, just a few minutes up the road from Willenhall in the town of Walsall.

Also revealed on Danks’ POF profile is his full name and age. When you have that, plus a town, you can often find a person’s address on the UK’s Electoral Register.

It’s also trivial to find social networking pages. Not only do pictures on Danks’ POF profile match those on his Facebook page, he also has a revealing movie item listed in his interests section.

Of course, none of this in itself is enough to build a decent case, but when you have the police on board as FACT did, things can be sped up somewhat. On May 23, 2013 Danks was raided and then, just two days later, he did something quite astonishing.

Posting on his Facebook page, the then 24-year-old took to his Facebook account (he has two) to mock the makers of Fast and Furious 6.

“Seven billion people and I was the first. F*** you Universal Pictures,” he wrote.

Also amazing was Danks’ apparent disregard for the predicament he was in. On May 10, 2013, Danks again took to Facebook, this time to advertise that he was selling copies of movies including Robocop and Captain America.

This continued distribution of copyrighted material particularly aggravated the Court at his sentencing hearing this week, with Danks’ behavior being described as “bold, arrogant and cocksure offending.”

While the list of events above clearly shows a catalog of errors that some might even find amusing, the desire of many pirates to utilize the same nickname across many sites is a common one employed by some of the biggest in the game.

Once these and other similar indicators migrate across into real-life identities and activities (and the ever-present Facebook account of course), joining the dots is not difficult – especially for the police and outfits like FACT. And once that happens, no amount of VPN encryption of lack of logging is going to put the genie back in the bottle.

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[Mike]

Back in May last year, Techdirt wrote about how the UK police worked in worryingly-close collaboration with the local anti-piracy group, FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft), effectively becoming its private enforcement squad. As we noted recently that case has now passed through the UK courts, with Philip Danks receiving 33 months in prison.

The severe sentence is noteworthy, but what's really interesting here is how Danks was tracked down. TorrentFreak has written a fascinating follow-up piece explaining just how easy he made it. Apparently, Danks's online alias in the torrenting scene was TheCod3r. That seems safe enough, revealing nothing about the person behind it. But as TorrentFreak notes, a quick online search for that term brings up a link to someone else using exactly the same nickname, this time on the dating site Plenty of Fish:

Clicking that link on dating site Plenty of Fish (POF) reveals a whole range of information about a person who, at the very least, uses the same online nickname as Danks. There's no conclusive proof that it's the same person, but several pieces of information begin to build a picture.

In his POF profile, Danks reveals his city as being Willenhall, a small town situated in an area known locally as the Black Country. What FACT would've known soon after the movie leaked online was which cinema it had been recorded in. That turned out to be a Showcase cinema, just a few minutes up the road from Willenhall in the town of Walsall.

Danks also seems to have been incredibly reckless on Facebook:

On May 10, 2013, Danks again took to Facebook, this time to advertise that he was selling copies of movies including Robocop and Captain America.

This continued distribution of copyrighted material particularly aggravated the Court at his sentencing hearing this week, with Danks’ behavior being described as "bold, arrogant and cocksure offending."

The TorrentFreak article concludes by making an important point:

While the list of events above clearly shows a catalog of errors that some might even find amusing, the desire of many pirates to utilize the same nickname across many sites is a common one employed by some of the biggest in the game.

Once these and other similar indicators migrate across into real-life identities and activities (and the ever-present Facebook account of course), joining the dots is not difficult -- especially for the police and outfits like FACT. And once that happens, no amount of VPN encryption of lack of logging is going to put the genie back in the bottle.

In other words, these high-profile wins for the copyright industry are not the result of the police making use of surveillance powers, or of clever sleuthing by organizations like FACT. Rather, they are the direct and largely predictable result of the arrogance and stupidity displayed by those breaking the law.

Originally Published: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 21:36:37 GMT
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[ViperScale]

Good riddance, I think cams are worthless to begin with but no respect for people selling stuff.

[RobertX]

I agree.

[trodas]

It is almost suicide to use main nickname to do anything "problematic."

But selling the copies are kind of stealing. One thing is nonprofit sharing, another is selling. Well... 33 months will clear that out right now.