The owner of a software piracy Web site has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison--the longest sentence ever handed down for software piracy.
Nathan Peterson, 27, of Los Angeles, sold copyrighted software at a huge discount on his site, iBackups.net, prosecutors said. The FBI began investigating the site in 2003 and shut it down in February 2005.
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U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III on Friday ordered Peterson to pay restitution of more than $5.4 million. Peterson pleaded guilty in December in Alexandria, Va., to two counts of copyright infringement for illegally copying and selling more than $20 million in software.
Justice Department and industry officials called the case one of the largest involving Internet software piracy ever prosecuted.
Last month, Ellis sentenced Danny Ferrer, a Florida man who pleaded guilty to copyright charges in connection with multimillion-dollar sales of pirated software, to six years in prison.
Software piracy resulted in a loss of $34 billion worldwide in 2005, a $1.6 billion increase over 2004, according to a study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance.
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