Listed: September 9, 2008 
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Washington, DC — The administrator of peer-to-peer Internet piracy group EliteTorrents.org Tuesday was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $20,000, the Justice Department announced.

U.S. District Court Judge James P. Jones ordered Daniel Dove, 26, previously of Clintwood, Va., to serve 18 months in prison for his role as a high-ranking administrator of a peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet piracy group.

During the trial, the government presented evidence showing Dove was administrator of EliteTorrents.org, a group that distributed copyrighted pre-released movies. Prosecutors said Dove managed a group of Elite Torrent members known as “Uploaders” who used very high-speed Internet connections to supply the pirated content to the group.

The conviction is the eighth from Operation D-Elite, a federal crackdown on illegal distribution of copyrighted material via P2P networks using BitTorrent file-distribution technology.

Operation D-Elite targeted leading members of a technologically sophisticated P2P network known as Elite Torrents. At its height, the Elite Torrents group attracted more than 125,000 members and helped illegal distribution of approximately 700 movies, which were downloaded more than 1.1 million times, prosecutors said.