Calif. man pleads guilty to video piracy
Source: Yahoo Dailynews
The Justice Department said 36-year-old Mohsin Mynaf of Vacaville, Calif., pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement, trafficking in counterfeit labels and circumventing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (news - web sites) (DMCA). The DMCA is a controversial law backed by music companies and other large copyright holders that prohibits anyone from cracking code designed to protect copyrights.
The Justice Department said the case is the first criminal conviction in California and the second in the United States under the DMCA. In the second case, a modified chip was used to circumvented software security schemes and allow Sony's PlayStation to play unauthorized copies of computer games, the Justice Department said.
The conviction comes as Hollywood and electronics manufacturers are beefing up copy-protection schemes to thwart online film pirates. The Video Watermarking (VWM) Group--a coalition of consumer-electronics companies that includes Hitachi, Macrovision, NEC, Philips Electronics, Pioneer and Sony--aims to create a system that places a unique bit of code into a video file, making it difficult to copy or play without permission from copyright holders.
According to Mynaf's plea agreement, investigators found a video reproduction lab at his residence used to manufacture and sell counterfeit videos. Among the equipment were 18 videocassette recorders, printers and a device used to bypass anti-copying technology. Mynaf stripped a copy-protection scheme from Macrovision that embeds an electronic signal during the recording of videos and causes an unauthorized copy to be distorted.
