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.
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