SEATTLE — An Everett man on Wednesday admitted that he operated websites that sold pirated movies, television shows and workout videos.
Sang Jim Kim, 36, faces up to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
Kim was arrested last year and indicted in December for criminal copyright infringement. Federal agents seized two web sites — 82movie.com and 007disk.com — and the servers that supported them.
Investigators say the sites were operated by Kim’s company, World Multimedia Group Inc., based in Lynnwood.
A source in Seoul, South Korea, first alerted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that Kim’s company was illegally distributing large amounts of copyrighted material through two websites.
The websites required users to pay a fee for the downloads. The sites offered movies, including some that were still in the theaters or not yet released on DVD. They also offered television shows illegally downloaded from Korean broadcasters. The programs were marketed to the Korean community in the U.S., according to federal authorities.
Kim told undercover agents that movie companies frequently contacted him about the movies on his site. He told the agents that he would remove the movies and then make them available again a few weeks later.
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