4 Men Face Federal Charges in Effort to Stop Movie Piracy

Hoping to send a strong message to movie pirates, the U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI and the Motion Picture Assn. of America joined forces at a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday to announce federal copyright infringement charges against four men.

The message is clear, said Debra W. Yang, U.S. attorney for the Central District of California: “The federal government will be looking over your shoulder.”

The downtown federal courthouse conference room was decorated with posters for such movies as “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Passion of the Christ” and “Mystic River,” and with DVDs, including “Kill Bill Vol. 1” and “Lost in Translation” -- copies of which have wound up on the Internet.

In a related development, a federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Russell William Sprague on charges of copying more than 40 Academy Award “screeners” he had obtained from a friend, actor Carmine Caridi. Sprague was flown to California from Homewood, Ill., for the hearing.

Another criminal complaint announced Thursday alleged that Richard Young, 42, Victor Ochoa, 31, and Frank Pelayo Jr., 23, had illegally copied movies as employees of Lightning Media, a post-production facility based in Hollywood.

The three are charged with misdemeanor copyright infringement and could face a maximum of one year in prison.

Young was charged with distributing a version of “The Passion of the Christ,” which ended up on the Internet and in the hands of the New York Post. Ochoa was charged with distributing a copy of “Kill Bill Vol. 1,” which was duplicated and sold at Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade. Pelayo was charged with distributing “The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” a copy of which was allegedly given to him by a friend who works at another Los Angeles-area post-production facility, Accent Media.

According to the complaint, the three men were part of a group of workers at the facility who copied and swapped films for personal use.

In addition to making copies ordered by the copyright owners, the defendants “would make additional ... copies of the films,” the complaint alleged. “These additional, illegal copies were often placed on a shelf in the main DVD room” of the company, where all employees had access to the discs.

None of the men were charged with uploading the movies to the Internet or selling them for a profit. Lightning Media is a facility where studios send films to mix the soundtracks.

The company, whose clients include Miramax Films and Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions, released a statement Thursday.

“We learned almost six months ago that some employees were illegally in possession of unreleased feature films,” said CEO Steve Buchsbaum. “These employees did so without the knowledge or authorization of Lightning Media. We worked closely with the FBI to identify the perpetrators and to put a stop to the piracy.”

The investigation began in November when representatives of Gibson discovered that a three-minute clip of “The Passion of the Christ” was available on the Internet.

They notified the FBI and traced the complete unfinished version, which was also available on the Internet, to Lightning Dubbs, as Lightning Media was previously known. That version ended up at the New York Post, which screened the bootleg copy for a panel and published members’ reactions.

According to the complaint, cooperating witnesses turned over to FBI investigators at least 59 DVDs illegally copied at Lightning Dubbs and other firms.