Today, FBI filed a criminal complaint against Jorge Romero accusing him of uploading two episodes to the LiveDigital.com website on January 6 – eight days before it was broadcast on Fox. Romero is accused of uploading the second two episodes of "24" to the same website on January 7, the same day that he allegedly posted links to the uploads on other websites, which made it easier for people interested in seeing the unauthorized episodes to find them.
Fox broadcast the first four episodes of "24" on January 14 and 15, and subsequently released the four-episode season premier on DVD.
The complaint charges Romero "with uploading copyrighted material to a publicly accessible computer network knowing the work was intended for commercial distribution, a felony that carries a statutory maximum sentence of three years in federal prison."
Romero, who admitted that he had obtained the pirated copies from another website, that he uploaded the episodes of "24" to LiveDigitial.com prior to them being aired by Fox, and that he put links to the uploads on another website. If convicted, Romero faces three years in prison.Twentieth Century Fox, issued a statement in support of the FBI's investigation. "We are grateful to the FBI and U.S. Attorney's offices in Los Angeles for aggressively pursuing this matter, and we hope it will serve as a powerful warning that uploading copyrighted TV shows and movies to the Internet can be a crime with significant penalties and will be prosecuted as such," the company said.