WASHINGTON: A British national who headed the “DrinkOrDie” underground Internet piracy group was sentenced to 51 months in prison on copyright infringement charges, US officials said on Friday.

The Justice Department said Hew Raymond Griffiths, 44, a British national who had been living in Bateau Bay, Australia, was among the first people to be extradited to the United States for an intellectual property offence. He pleaded guilty on April 20 to US criminal charges after having spent three years incarcerated in Australia while fighting his extradition and was sentenced Friday by District Court Judge Claude Hilton. Officials said Griffiths was the leader of a group known as DrinkOrDie, believed to be one of the oldest software piracy groups on the Internet.

DrinkOrDie was founded in Russia in 1993 and expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. It specialised in cracking software codes and distributing illegal versions over the Internet of software, games, movies and music titles worth millions of dollars.

“From his home in Australia, Griffiths became one of the most notorious leaders of the underground Internet piracy community by orchestrating the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in copyrighted material,” said Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher.—AFP