The 38-year old faced a maximum of four years in prison and a $6,400 fine for every copy distributed without permission, said the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Chan was originally arrested in January this year and charged with illegally uploading three films – Miss Congeniality, Red Planet and Daredevil – onto a website using the BitTorrent protocol.
BitTorrent is a program specially designed for transferring files. BitTorrent users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of any file – rather than the entire file being swapped at once, as on a Kazaa- or Grokster-type network.
A central server called a BitTorrent tracker coordinates the action of all such peers. Crucially, the tracker manages the P2P connections to share distribution of a file, rather than sharing the file itself. This way, many users can access a file such as a movie as it is being downloaded, using less bandwidth than if each user had to stream the movie separately. Meanwhile, the co-ordinating server has no knowledge of the contents of the files being traded.
There are other similar programs, such as eDonkey or DirectConnect, and all have been targeted by the movie industry over the past year.
In December last year the MPAA filed over 100 lawsuits in the US and UK, accusing website operators of helping online pirates steal hundreds of millions of illegal copies of movies and TV programs, and forcing a number of sites to close.
Users have been targeted too. Lawsuits against 286 users were filed by the MPAA in August 2005.
