Two men linked to the "pirate" Android store Appbucket pleaded guilty to copyright violations. The Ministry of Justice estimates that the webσελίδα κατάφερε να κερδίσει πάνω από 80.000 δολάρια κατά τη διάρκεια των δύο ετών λειτουργίας της. Η τύχη του τρίτου εναγομένου του Appbucket είναι ακόμα άγνωστη.
With the help of the French and Dutch police, the FBI was able to shut down the Android pirates bedspread applanet.net, appbucket.net and snappzmarket.com during the 2012 summer.
The seizures of the specific domains were the first against pirated marketplaces for mobile applications, following similar actions known from BitTorrent website seizures and streaming sites.
Yesterday, the Ministry of Justice announced that two of the three webmasters have declared themselves guilty of violating the copyright law. Nicholas Narbone, 26 of the Year, and Thomas Dye, 21 of the Year signed a compromise agreement with the government and the trial is currently scheduled to take place in June.
They were not provided information regarding the third party defendant of the illegal website, Thomas Pace, who was primarily responsible for finding pirated copies of Android apps as well as managing the site's servers.
Authorities estimate that more than one million applications have been trafficked through the site, which at retail costs about 700.000 dollars. During the two-year running of the site, defendants allegedly won over 80.000 dollars.
"The FBI will continue to work with a variety of other law enforcement agencies to identify, investigate, and prosecute individuals and groups involved in such criminal activities that seek to benefit from the hard work and creative ideas of others." said FBI Special Agent Johnson.
