After pleading guilty in a US federal court earlier this year, 44-year-old Hew Griffiths, the head of underground piracy group "DrinkOrDie", was sentenced to 51 months in jail last week on one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Griffiths has already spent almost three years at a detention center in Australia before his extradition to the US in February. The judge who sentenced him apparently took this into account when determining how much time Griffiths will serve in the US and said that Griffiths will only have to serve another 15 months in jail.
DrinkOrDie was founded in Russia in 1993 and is now estimated to have been responsible for copying and distributing more than $50 million of copyrighted content based on the retail value of the copies distributed by the group. The group was dismantled in 2001 after being subject to 70 raids in the US, UK, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Australia.
News source: Ars Technica
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