The owner of a website where illegal software was for sale must pay no less than 5.4 million dollars as a punishment. Also, the site manager in question has to live 87 months behind bars on water and bread and hand over his belongings. This record penalty Nathan Peterson heard of the defunct iBackups.net against a judge in the United States. Never before has a person found guilty of software piracy faced such a severe punishment. Peterson admitted to two copyright infringement charges. These violations were brought to the attention of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), which pointed out the activities on the website to the FBI in 2003. The SIIA acted on behalf of the then Macromedia and Symantec, among others.
According to the US Department of Justice, iBackups.net was the largest for-profit software piracy website ever busted by this organization. The accused allegedly sold 20 million dollars worth of goods through copying and resale of software. According to the SIIA, the average damages in similar cases would be slightly less than half, while the average damages paid in these cases is $659,000. Peterson’s fine is based on the profit he made through iBackups. He managed to attract visitors to his site through contextual advertising à la AdSense, among other things. There they were told that the programs to be purchased had been copied because they were legal backups made by licensees. However, selling them is illegal. Nathan Peterson will most likely feel the aftermath of the case for the rest of his life. After serving more than seven years in prison, he will pay the fine in installments of $200 per month. In the case of 5 million dollars, that corresponds to more than two thousand years of remittance.