LOS ANGELES
A man who plead guilty to copyright infringement for illegally posting screener versions of two movies – “The Revenant” and “The Peanuts Movie” – to a publicly accessible website was sentenced Tuesday, officials said.
U.S. District Court Judge Stephen V. Wilson sentenced William Kyle Morarity, who used the screen name “clutchit,” 31, to eight months home detention.
“Mr. Morarity used his position of trust to gain access to sensitive intellectual property, then shared that content online and incurred large-scale losses to the owner of that property,” said Deirdre Fike, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “The theft of intellectual property – in this case, major motion pictures – discourages creative incentive and affects the average American making ends meet in the entertainment industry.”
The judge also ordered Morarity to be put on 24 months probation and ordered to pay $1.12 million in restitution to Twentieth Century Fox, according to officials.
Morarity agreed to assist the FBI in the production of a public service announcement to assist the government in educating the public about the harms of copyright infringement and the illegal uploading of movies that are the legal property of the movie studio, according to authorities.
As a result of the illegal upload, more than 1 million people were able to download “The Revenant,” which caused 20th Century Fox Film Corporation to suffer losses of well over $1 million
Morarity, of Lancaster, obtained the screeners without authorization while at work on a studio lot. He copied the screeners onto a portable drive and uploaded the movies from his home computer on December 17 and 19, 2015 to a BitTorrent website called “Pass the Popcorn,” which allowed downloading via a peer-to-peer network.
“The Revenant” was uploaded six days prior to its limited release in theaters.
“The film industry creates thousands of jobs in Southern California,” said U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker. “The defendant’s illegal conduct caused significant harm to the victim movie studio. The fact that the defendant stole these films while working on the lot of a movie studio makes his crime more egregious.”