On Friday, two men were sentenced to jail and fined in the Eastern District Court of Virginia after pleading guilty to several counts of copyright infringement. Willie Lambert, 57, and Sean Lovelady, 27, were part of a larger group called IMAGiNE, whose members recorded movies in theaters and then uploaded those recordings to BitTorrent.

IMAGiNE had a reputation for being the first to upload pirated versions of major movies soon after the movie's release. Members of the group allegedly made separate video and audio recordings of the movie and then stitched the media together before uploading the pirated copy to peer-to-peer networks. The group stopped uploading movies sometime around September 2011, and in April 2012 four members of the group, including Lambert and Lovelady, were formally charged with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, four counts of criminal copyright infringement, and one count of distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution.

As Ars reported in April, each of those charges carried a maximum sentence of five years of jailtime, but Lambert will serve only 30 months after pleading guilty, and Lovelady will serve 23 months. In addition, Lambert was ordered to pay $449,514 in restitution, Lovelady only $7,500.

According to TorrentFreak, "a report prepared on behalf of the major movie studios further alleged that IMAGiNE was responsible for 41 percent of all instances of English language theatrical audio piracy from September 2009 to September 2011."