EUGENE — A Newport man was sentenced Friday to a year in federal prison for pirating thousands of copyright-protected movies and television shows, illegally distributing them on the internet and evading taxes on his profits from the multimillion-dollar scheme.
Talon White, 31, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and three years’ probation after being convicted of copyright infringement and tax evasion.
Investigators were tipped off in October 2013 that White was allowing paid subscribers to stream and download movies and television shows, some of which had yet to be released to the public, from numerous websites, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office news release.
The Motion Picture Association of America demanded in 2014 that White cease the illegal activity — a demand he ignored over the next four years while moving his business and subscribers among websites to avoid detection, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
It was a lucrative scheme. In total, authorities say White netted more than $8 million.
Between February 2018 and September 2018 alone, he collected nearly $3 million in subscription fees from the websites.
When investigators served a search on his home and several bank accounts in November 2018, they seized $3.9 million from his accounts, $35,000 in cash and more than $1 million in cryptocurrency. White also filed false income tax returns between 2013 and 2017, underreporting his income by more than $4.4 million and failing to pay $1.7 million in taxes, authorities said.
White pleaded guilty in November 2019 to copyright infringement and tax evasion. In 2019, White’s lawyer, Rain Minns told KOIN(6) that her client was a professional poker player.
During his Friday sentencing in U.S. District Court in Eugene, White was ordered to pay to more than $4.3 million in restitution to the Motion Picture Association and Internal Revenue Service. He was also ordered to forfeit all the money and cryptocurrency seized by agents, as well his 2,248-square-foot Newport home, worth an estimated $415,000, that he purchased with proceeds from the websites.
— Ted Sickinger, The Oregonian/OregonLive