Australian police charge MovieX with copyright infringement and money laundering

On 3 December, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) arrested and charged two unemployed men in their twenties with multiple copyright and money laundering offences. The two organised a BitTorrent tracker site that is alleged to have facilitated the illegal distribution of millions of movies. A bank account belonging to one of the defendants which contained AUS$54,000 (About 35,000 US dollars) was frozen. Investigations into other bank accounts continue.

The tracker facilitated the sharing of copyright movies among 400,000 international members, including thousands of “VIP Members” who paid up to AUS$10 a month for access to direct downloads. It is likely that the operators of the tracker made more than AUS$10,000 (about 6,450 US dollars) dollars per month. The tracker has probably facilitated the transfer of over 10,000 terabytes of data, the equivalent of 14.3 millions of copies of movies and TV shows.

If the duo is found guilty, they face up to five years in prison. While the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft who participated in the investigation is no doubt happy with the results, it seems that MovieX is already up and running again. A third admin who was not arrested, today claimed that despite evidence to the contrary, the shutdown had nothing to do with the arrests, but was “due to a harddrive failure”.