A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a producing and distribution firm utilized by main film studios and sharing them on-line earlier than the flicks’ scheduled launch dates.

In keeping with a US Division of Justice press release, Steven Hale labored on the DVD firm and allegedly stole “quite a few ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the flicks, “bypassing encryption that forestalls unauthorized copying” and shared copies extensively on-line. He additionally supposedly offered the precise stolen discs on e-commerce websites, the DOJ alleged.

Hale has been charged with “two counts of felony copyright infringement and one depend of interstate transportation of stolen items,” the DOJ stated. He faces a most sentence of 5 years for the previous, and 10 years for the latter.

Amongst blockbuster motion pictures that Hale is accused of stealing are Dune, F9: The Quick Saga, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Godzilla v. Kong, and, maybe most notably, Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The DOJ claimed that “copies of Spider-Man: No Means Dwelling had been downloaded tens of thousands and thousands of occasions, with an estimated loss to the copyright proprietor of tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars}.”

In 2021, when the Spider-Man film was launched in theaters solely, it turned the primary film in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic to gross greater than $1 billion on the field workplace, Forbes famous. However for these unwilling to enterprise out to see the film, Forbes reported, the temptation to search out leaks and torrents apparently turned exhausting to withstand. It was on this local weather that Hale is accused of extensively sharing copies of the film earlier than it was launched on-line.