ESA, FBI Team To Sentence Video Game Pirate

After a separate and recent successful operation against game store owners selling modded Xboxes with installed pirate games, the ESA has announced another arrest in its battle against game piracy: Dashiell Ponce de Leon has been convicted for his second offense of selling pirated games, the first of which was in 2001. Ponce de Leon was sentenced to three years and ten months in prison, and ordered to pay $1.154 million in damages for criminal copyright infringement. His pleas for leniency were denied by the judge given his prior record of piracy; after being sentenced in a 2001 civil suit, Ponce de Leon wrote an apology out to those whose games he'd pirated, but soon returned to his illicit Internet practice. "We are grateful for the work of U.S. law enforcement and prosecutors in bringing this defendant to justice," said Entertainment Software Association Douglas Lowenstein. "Sentences that include significant jail time send a clear message to software pirates that intellectual property theft is a serious crime and that perpetrators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." The criminal case against Ponce de Leon came out of an anti-piracy force that includes the FBI, US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Washington D.C.'s Attorney's Office, and the Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.