The federal government seized the domain name for online movie-sharing site NinjaVideo.net in June 2010, but it didn't file criminal copyright charges against the site admins until two weeks ago. Now, it has secured a guilty plea from NinjaVideo cofounder Matthew David Howard Smith, a 23-year old from Raleigh, North Carolina.

Smith ran the site from 2008 until its shutdown in 2010. According to the government, Smith has admitted to signing ad deals that grossed $500,000 during that period, and he was personally responsible for designing many of the site's features.

"While visitors to the website were permitted to download infringing content for free, they were also invited to make donations, which provided them access to private forum boards that contained a wider range of infringing material," said the government. "A premium member obtained the rights to request specific infringing content, which the NinjaVideo administrators would then locate and add to the website."

One of the other accused admins, Hana "Phara" Beshara, apparently believes that her group's widespread infringement was a "gray area" of copyright law. "We're labeled pirates. We're called thieves," she said in a recording last year before the site was seized. "We're raided and arrested and we're forced to hide behind aliases while we weave and we bob through these grey areas of laws not yet written."

Smith will be sentenced on December 16 and faces up to five years in prison. Beshara and two other Americans currently face trial in February, unless they too plead out.