Seth Kleinberg, 26, of Pasadena, California; Jeffrey Lerman, 20, of College Park, Maryland; and Albert Bryndzda, 32, of Flushing, New York, pleaded guilty to the charges on Tuesday morning, effectively admitting to having prominent or leadership roles in some of the most notorious on-line software piracy groups in the world.
These groups, known as "warez groups," are the first-providers: the original source for the illegal trading and on-line distribution of pirated works.
The 18-month operation, described by authorities as the largest ever multinational investigation of internet piracy, focused on the highest echelons of the groups.
According to documents filed in federal court, Kleinberg admitted that he was a senior member of Fairlight and Kalisto, which specialised in the illegal distribution of PC and console games.
Using the on-line nickname "basilisk," Kleinberg provided various services to the groups, including supplying them with new software titles, assisting in the "cracking" process (i.e. disabling copyright protection measures that are embedded on the software), and serving as a courier to distribute the pirated works to various servers around the world.
Lerman admitted that he was a "ripper" for the Kalisto group, which meant that he digitally manipulated the constituent files of pirated copies of computer games so that each game would fit on a single CD-ROM, in order to eliminate or circumvent the game's copy protection controls to enable unauthorised duplication and to make it easier to distribute the games over the internet.
Brynzda admitted to having built and operated two large servers that he, with the assistance of others, connected to the internet for the use of members of the Fairlight and Kalisto groups (among others) to store and distribute thousands of titles of pirated software and other digital media.
Kleinberg faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, and Lerman and Bryndzda each face up to five years in prison.
"Stealing the intellectual property of others is no different from any other form of thievery," said US Attorney Kevin O'Connor. "It is a priority of this Office and the Department of Justice to protect the intellectual property rights of our nation's inventors and creators, regardless of where the pirates are located."
To date the investigation has yielded searches and seizures of over 70 high-level targets that were conducted in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, as well as Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The investigation is continuing.