Owner of piracy site gets record sentence

Nathan Peterson, the owner of the software piracy site will spend the next 7 years and 3 months behind bars. This is the longest sentence ever handed down for software piracy.
In addition,U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III ruled that the defendant must pay restitution of more than $5.4 million and also to be stripped of assets including property, cars and a boat.

According to the prosecutors, Peterson has been selling illegal copies of Microsoft and Adobe products at a huge discount via his website, iBackups.net.
The FBI started the investigation in 2003 and managed to shut down the site two years later, in February 2005.

In December 2005, the defendant chose to plead guilty to copyright infringement at a hearing in the District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. He admitted selling more than $20 million in software.
Peterson's Internet software piracy case was one of the largest to be prosecuted, said the US Department of Justice.