Operation D-Elite was an operation by agents of the United States'

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...

and

Immigration and Customs Enforcement The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE; ) is a federal law enforcement agency under the United States Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the United States from transnational crime and ille ...

agency against leading members of EliteTorrents, a

BitTorrent tracker A BitTorrent tracker is a special type of server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. In peer-to-peer file sharing, a software client on an end-user PC requests a file, and portions of the requested ...

site, resulting in five months of prison, five months of home arrest, and a $3,000 fine against Grant T. Stanley on October 17, 2006.US Department of Justice press release
Another administrator of the site, Scott McCausland, received the same sentence on December 19, 2006.US Department of Justice Press Release

Prelude

EliteTorrents was singled out among the large number of Bittorrent sites because EliteTorrents released a '' Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith'' workprint approximately six hours prior to the movie's theatrical release. This attracted the attention of the

MPAA The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, the mini-major Amazon MGM Studios, as well as the video streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. F ...

, which monitors BitTorrent sites. The MPAA began collecting information and pressuring the

to take some form of action. In addition to the Star Wars workprint, the owner of the EliteTorrents

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

lived in the United States, which made the site an easier target for U.S. authorities. However, the site's server was located in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

, and the other BitTorrent trackers located on that server continued to operate. When the site was first taken down, people who tried to access it were confronted by a notice, apparently created in

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

, which led the owners to announce that the site had been a victim of a

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

attack or some other type of hoax. However, in the early hours of May 25, the

United States Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a United States federal executive departments, federal executive department of the U.S. government that oversees the domestic enforcement of Law of the Unite ...

and FBI announced that they had taken down the website.

People charged

; Grant T. Stanley: Five months of jail time, five months of home arrest, and a $3,000 fine was leveled on October 17, 2006. ; Scott McCausland: Five months of jail time, five months of home arrest, and a $3,000 fine was leveled on October 17, 2006. ; An Duc Do: Known online as "R313007", was a

Drexel University Drexel University is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Drexel's undergraduate school was founded in 1891 by Anthony Joseph Drexel, Anthony J. Drexel, a financier ...

graduate. In 2005, he was arrested in connection with uploading '' Star Wars Episode III'' as part of Operation D-Elite Faced with the steep jail term An Duc Do plead guilty to conspiracy and copyright infringement. While Duc Do shared movies like ''Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'', ''The Flight of the Phoenix'', and ''King Arthur'' from a computer server where 133,000 users had access to it, he was not a high user. Floyd Miller, the prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia where Duc Do was charged said, "They ther Elite Torrent membersthreatened to kick him out of the organization because he wasn't uploading as much as some of the other pirates were doing," As part of the guilty plea he was sentenced to three years' probation, a $15,000 fine and 400 hours' of community service.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:D-Elite, Operation Copyright enforcement Federal Bureau of Investigation operations Internet services shut down by a legal challenge Domain name seizures by United States D

Prelude

People charged

See also

References