Jeramiah Perking from Porsmouth, Sean Lovelady from California, Gregory Cherwonik from New York and Wille Lambert from Pennsylvania have all been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia in this piracy case. Perkins, Cherwonik and Lambert were charged with two additional counts of copyright infringement outside the IMAGiNE case, while Perkins and Cherwonik are also charged with six additional counts of copyright infringement that were prepared for commercial distribution. Even though there were only few titles named in the indictment that were pirated on BitTorrent before the official release, everyone who ever got in touch with pirated movies probably knows that there are IMAGiNE versions of practically every movie, well at least the popular ones.

There was a leak of a conversation between Perkins and Cherwonik from last year.
Cherwonik – “You need to realize that IMAGiNE is the P2P top group. I’m actually surprised that we aren’t nailed yet”,
Perkins – “I’m not going to jail over this s***”.
Perkins was mostly involved in shooting movies at local movie theaters, and according to court papers was fully aware of the legal consequences. Unfortunately for him, he will not only go to prison but also will have to pay quite a large fine. He is currently out on bail and awaits sentencing that should take place in first part of 2013.

[Ed – Expect to see more news items like this as the MPAA, RIAA and other copyright holders secure their relationship to the federal law enforcement agencies. It is a sad commentary when Copyright” infringement can carry a higher minimum sentence than assault or even aggravated battery (minimum of three years).  One would think that attacking another person with a weapon (that is not a firearm) would be much worse than seeding a movie, song or TV show on the internet…]

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