Pirate site torpedoed by Department of Justice

THERE WILL BE NO MORE swashbuckling for David Rocci, the 22 year old better known as krazy8. Rocci ran the site Isonews.com which catered for pirates and sold Xbox mod chips. The US Department of Justice has seized the site as part of a plea entered by Rocci.

The key to Rocci's downfall was importing and selling Enigmah mod chips for the Xbox. He might have avoided the attention of the authorities were it not for the fact that his site, as well as advertising and selling the mod chips, went out of its way to describe how to use them with pirated software. After a swift applying of the DMCA and a trip to court, Rocci is now awaiting sentencing. He could get anything up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

The DoJ summed up the situation quite nicely, "David Rocci developed a public website that specifically catered to the underground piracy community. He attempted to profit by marketing circumvention devices to that community knowing they would be used to play pirated games." It was, it seems, an open and shut case.

In what could send shivers through the US warez community, the DoJ went further, "he thought that there were no risks associated with his actions. He was wrong and everyone engaged in the warez scene should take note." A fairly obvious indication that the DoJ already has other outfits in its crosshairs.

According to the DoJ, the site had 100,000 registered users. The question that crosses our mind immediately is whether the IP addresses of those users were logged. There is no doubt that the DoJ has the Isonews.com domain but does it have the servers too? If it does, there could well be people in the warez community getting a knock at the door. µ

* THIS IS PART of the Justice Departments "Operation Buccaneer", details of which you can find here.

L'INQS
The now government owned iSONEWS