FBI agents agents discovered hundreds of Academy screeners during their investigation into pirated Academy Award DVDs, subsequently arresting a 51-year-old man and charging him with criminal copyright infringement and illegal interception of a satellite signal.

The man, Russell William Sprague, was arrested at Chicago home where agents discovered hundreds of Academy screeners.

They were mainly VHS tapes, it appears from a Hollywood Reporter story here, which says according to the FBI, most of them went originally to Carmine Caridi, a 22-year member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences who’s been sending up to 60 a year to Sprague for at least 36 months.

Caridi, who hasn’t been charged with anything, said he thought Sprague was a film buff and wasn’t paid for the screeners, states the report, going on that he said he didn’t know Sprague had duplicated the “tapes”. However, Caridicould be expelled from the Academy for allowing them out of his possession, say Gregg Kilday and Paul Bond, continuing:

“In addition, if it were to be proved he knew the screeners had been duplicated, he could be charged with contributory copyright infringement, said studio sources with knowledge of the case.”

Sprague will be extradited to Los Angeles to face charges and faces up to $500,000 in fines and up to eight years in prison – three for copyright infringement and five for illegal interception of satellite signals.

“The meat and potatoes of the case is how many movies were copied and how many times,” Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, is quoted as saying.

“The way this thing will shake out is that we’ll have to indict him in a few weeks or we’ll make a deal with him.”

According to an affidavit filed by FBI special agent Bryan DuChene, another FBI agent, Jeffrey Cugno, was contacted this month by David Kaplan, vp intellectual property counsel at Warner Bros Studios.

Kaplan told Cugno “anti-piracy investigators” working with Warner had found illegal copies of The Last Samurai and Mystic River available for downloading on the Internet, say Kilday and Bond.

“Because of the hidden security markers, installed by Technicolor, that the studios put on Academy screeners for the first time this year, Warner had determined that VHS tapes of the films had been issued to Caridi.

“Ultimately, Technicolor technicians determined that copies of such pirated movies as Warners’ ‘Samurai’ and ‘Mystic,’ 20th Century Fox’s ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,’ Fox Searchlight’s ‘thirteen’ and Buena Vista’s ‘Calendar Girls’ all could be traced to Academy screeners that had been provided to Caridi.”

According to an FBI affidavit Caridi, who like all Academy members had signed an agreement promising not to allow screeners to be taken outside of his home and office, Caridi said he met Sprague three to five years ago and that Sprague had asked him if he’d be willing to mail him his Academy screeners, says the report.

Since then, Caridi had sent Sprague 30-60 screeners a year, the FBI said. Caridi sent Sprague all of the screeners he received this year, including Something’s Gotta Give and the aforementioned films.

According to the FBI, Sprague admitted receiving screeners from Caridi and said he’d used Copy Guard Breaker to copy the VHS tapes to DVD and then returned the original VHS tapes and two VHS copies of each to Caridi, says the Hollywood Reporter which also quotes “Johnson, the U.S. attorney” as saying there was little financial incentive for Sprague to upload the films to the Internet – if that’s what he did – beyond the simple trading of movies with others.

The FBI affidavit does not explain how the films were uploaded to the Internet.

Separately, DirecTV filed a civil lawsuit against Sprague in May over his alleged theft of its satellite signal, says the report, adding that Mrozek said, “It’s kind of separate from the movie thing, but who knows? We’ll continue to investigate.”

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2004 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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