FBI Make Arrests in Game Piracy Conspiracy Case

According to the San Jose Mercury News, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested Chirayu Patel in Fremont, California, in a nationwide operation to infiltrate piracy groups, including some of the largest Internet video game pirating networks. Patel's arrest is one of a possible several to be announced later, as full details are due to be announced soon by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The operation involved undercover FBI agents posing as piracy enthusiasts willing to lend disk storage space to the electronically encoded pirated media. The agents eventually accumulated 27 terabytes worth of material, such as just-released video games, as well as movies and other software. The value of the illegal software stored on the FBI servers eventually tallied $379,101. Evidence against Patel in particular included his alleged membership in the Boozers piracy group, which contributed 1.4 terabytes of illegal material to the undercover agents' servers. The most expensive violation was server operating system software valued at $4,350. Recent research by Macrovision on console piracy concluded that a significant percentage of hardcore computer users pirate game software, and 43 percent of all of these gamers who play pirated games download over 15 pirated titles a year. Over 74 percent of those downloaded pirated games come from Internet websites or peer-to-peer networks.