A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies’ scheduled release dates.
According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole “numerous ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the movies, “bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying” and shared copies widely online. He also supposedly sold the actual stolen discs on e-commerce sites, the DOJ alleged.
Hale has been charged with “two counts of criminal copyright infringement and one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods,” the DOJ said. He faces a maximum sentence of five years for the former, and 10 years for the latter.
Among blockbuster movies that Hale is accused of stealing are Dune, F9: The Fast Saga, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Godzilla v. Kong, and, perhaps most notably, Spider-Man: No Way Home.
The DOJ claimed that “copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home were downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars.”
In 2021, when the Spider-Man movie was released in theaters only, it became the first movie during the COVID-19 pandemic to gross more than $1 billion at the box office, Forbes noted. But for those unwilling to venture out to see the movie, Forbes reported, the temptation to find leaks and torrents apparently became hard to resist. It was in this climate that Hale is accused of widely sharing copies of the movie before it was released online.
But Hale wasn’t the only one feeding movie fans hungry for downloads of the film. After the Spider-Man movie’s release, Comic Book Movies noted that bootlegs were everywhere online.
Soon it became dangerous to download the movie, though, as popular demand for the movie quickly put a target on downloaders’ backs and scammers soon planted malware in Spider-Man movie torrents that ReasonLabs reported used the movie to “lure in as many victims as possible.”
ReasonLabs said that the malware was “likely from a Russian torrenting site.” It took over the would-be Spider-Man movie watchers’ computers without setting off Windows Defender and with the goal of cryptomining in the background for the bad actors’ benefit.
Movie studios are likely pleased that potentially one bad actor has been charged with ripping their Marvel movie and others when the movie theater industry was recovering from early pandemic shutdowns and lulls in attendance.
It was also a hard fight to get the Spider-Man movie, in particular, on the big screen. When Spider-Man: No Way Home was released, Marvel struck a deal with the estate of Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko to settle several copyright disputes over who owns the rights to the character and others in the Marvel universe, Fortune reported That settlement allowed for Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s release, which seemed to mark a return to big box office earnings for studios, despite the rampant piracy.