In November that same year, the UK\u2019s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit revealed that\u00a0two arrests had been made<\/a>\u00a0in connection with the leak. The men were aged 33 and 36, the same ages as Pegram and Stephenson would\u2019ve been at the time of the arrests.<\/p>\n Information now provided by the UK\u2019s Crown Prosecution Service states that Pegram, Rollin, Taylor\u00a0and\u00a0Stephenson shared the movie on their platform, causing producer Lionsgate Films an estimated \u00a31.5 million ($2 million) in losses.<\/p>\n Other movies made available on the site affected members of the MPAA, including Sony, Disney, Fox\u00a0and\u00a0Warner Brothers. Their losses were calculated at \u00a37 million ($9.26 million), with Godzilla and X-Men: Days of Future Past accounting for almost \u00a34 million ($5.29 million) of that total.<\/p>\n According to the prosecution, Pegram owned the site and along with Taylor, paid for its servers. Both men uploaded content to the platform.<\/p>\n Rollin acted as an encoder and uploader and was found to have 47 \u201chigh quality\u201d movies on his computer, including the titles Are You Here and Third Person, in advance of their theatrical releases. Stephenson was responsible for setting up and maintaining the torrent site.<\/p>\n Rollin and Stephenson earlier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the copyright owners. At the first day of their trial on December 3, 2018, Pelgram and Taylor pleaded guilty to the same charge.<\/p>\n The quartet were all sentenced yesterday, with Pegram receiving a prison sentence of four-and-a-half years and Rollin a sentence of three years. Taylor and Stephenson were each sentenced to two years imprisonment, suspended for 24 months.<\/p>\n \u201cThese defendants set up and ran a site which allowed users to download films for free via BitTorrent, including the Expendables 3 before its release in the cinema,\u201d said Leigh Webber, a Specialist Prosecutor in the Specialist Fraud Division at the Crown Prosecution Service.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of them had\u00a0clear\u00a0knowledge of what the site was used for and\u00a0were\u00a0well aware they were breaching the copyright of the production companies.\u201d<\/p>\n The saga surrounding the leak of The Expendables 3 has now been running for almost five years, with several individuals, groups, and platforms being held responsible for its distribution.<\/p>\n In August 2014, file-hosting site Hulkfile\u00a0threw in the towel<\/a>\u00a0in the US after being targeted by Lionsgate after a user stored the movie on its servers. Almost a year later,\u00a0file-hosting\u00a0site Played.to\u00a0reached a settlement<\/a>\u00a0with the movie company after users streamed the movie illegally.<\/p>\n In March 2016, United States District Judge Otis Wright granted a\u00a0default judgment <\/a>which ordered Muhammed Ashraf (LimeTorrents), Tom Messchendorp (Dotsemper), and Lucas Lim (Swankshare) to pay the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 each, again for offering The Expendables 3.<\/p>\n Then last\u00a0December, a federal grand jury in California indicted five men for allegedly offering pre-release copies of hundreds of movies and TV shows via the Internet, The Expendables 3 included.<\/p>\n The\u00a0indictment<\/a>\u00a0revealed that at least one of the men stands accused of accessing the California-based servers of a content-management services company which was used to store and distribute motion picture assets.<\/p>\n In 2013, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) informed TorrentFreak that The Expendables 3 had been \u201cstolen\u201d from a \u201ccloud-based system\u201d, something which supports the information released in the indictment.<\/p>\n The unit later revealed they\u2019d arrested a then 26-year-old man in the UK during April 2015 under suspicion of leaking The Expendables 3.<\/p>\n While it is still to be officially confirmed if it is indeed the same person, Malik Luqman Farooq (placed at 30-years-old in December\u2019s indictment and said to be resident in the UK), is mentioned prominently by the Department of Justice in the US.<\/p>\n The indictment claims the unreleased copy of The Expendables 3 was obtained from a content-management services company and downloaded via TOR. The copy was then stored on an OVH server with Farooq later selling it to an undercover anti-piracy investigator working for the c.<\/p>\n Source: \u00a0![\"TorrentFreak\"](\"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/torrentfreak.png\")
<\/a> TorrentFreak.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"