The MPAA has won a jury conviction for criminal copyright infringement, opening the doors to many more cases like it in the future. A federal jury convicted 26-year-old Daniel Dove for both felony copyright infringement as well as conspiracy, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday. Dove, the last remaining administrator of EliteTorrents.com who did not plead guilty, now faces up to 10 years in prison.

The case goes all the way back to 2005, when investigators raided EliteTorrents and shut the site down with the help of the MPAA. At the time, EliteTorrents was one of the most popular Bit Torrent trackers around and had gained notoriety for making available prerelease movies like Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Search warrants were served on 10 people in the US and the site admins immediately faced criminal charges.

Two administrators, Scott McCausland and Grant Stanley, pleaded guilty in 2006 in hopes of avoiding a jury trial. Stanley got the first sentencing of five months in jail along with a $3,000 fine. McCausland also ended up serving five months in prison before going on probation, part of which involved an odd request from his probation officer to start using Windows (instead of Linux) so that monitoring software could be installed on the machine. Dove was the last holdout, refusing to plead guilty and apparently hoping that the jury would throw him a bone when he finally went to trial.

According to the DoJ, the jury was presented with evidence that Dove was in charge of a small group (known as the "Uploaders"), recruiting members with high-speed Internet connections to seed illegal content to the rest of EliteTorrents' users. Dove apparently ran a server himself, distributing the content to the Uploaders first before they seeded it to the rest of the world at large. Other evidence presented to the jury included "massive amounts" of software, video games, and music being made available through EliteTorrents, much of which was before they were officially available in stores. The evidence was apparently enough to convince the jury of Dove's involvement. He now faces up to 10 years in prison and will be sentenced on September 9, 2008.

The FBI and DoJ don't often go after file sharers as aggressively as they have in this case, but they appear willing to act when evidence collection has already been done for them. US Attorney John Brownlee's office acknowledged in 2006 that much of the evidence used in the case was supplied by the MPAA, showing that the recording industry can indeed convince the government to help fight its legal battles. With legal precedent on its side from cases like this and Jammie Thomas (even if Thomas may soon get a new trial), the recording industry is likely even more confident than ever before. The MPAA and RIAA are sure to keep going, supplying new evidence to law enforcement in hopes of winning even more convictions.

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