A former employee of a multinational DVD company was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing hundreds of pre-release DVDs and Blu-rays and leaking blockbuster movies online, the Department of Justice confirmed Thursday.
Back in May, Steven Hale pleaded guilty to spending about a year between 2021 and 2022 stealing discs from his employer and selling them online through e-commerce sites. Among movies that Hale uploaded for illegal download were highly anticipated titles like Dune, as well as sequels to popular films like F9: The Fast Saga and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
But according to the DOJ, Hale did the most damage by leaking advance copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home. That particular movie, released exclusively in theaters in 2021, became the first movie after the COVID pandemic started to gross $1 billion at the box office. Likely DVD sales were expected to be just as explosive, but for many fans too cautious to return to movie theaters at the time, DVD leaks became too enticing to pass up. Hale wasn’t the only one to recognize the high demand online, with illegal downloads of the movie becoming so widespread that ReasonLabs reported that scammers started planting malware in illegal copies of the movie to “lure in as many victims as possible.”
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