When Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith leaked online ahead of its cinema debut in 2005, the FBI rushed to find the culprits…
One day in the middle of May 2005, a ripple of excitement was felt at the offices of Champion Broadband, a tiny cable and internet company in Los Angeles. A worker there, 30 year-old Ramon Valdez, had somehow acquired a dodgy copy of Revenge Of The Sith – the much anticipated Star Wars prequel that, at the time, was still several days away from release. Within hours, a colleague of Valdez, Michael Fousse, had ripped the film from its DVD and uploaded it to the company’s servers.
A third Champion worker, 27 year-old Dwight Sityar, then purchased a stack of DVDs and began creating further copies of the purloined prequel, one of which landed in the hands of yet another employee, 25 year-old Stephani Reiko Gima. Had these illicit copies remained within this relatively small group, the whole story might have been forgotten. Instead, Gima gave her Star Wars DVD to her brother in law, Joel De Sagun Dimaano – a 30-something man who happened to work at MGM Studios.
In a fateful move, Dimaano then gave the DVD to another worker at MGM, Marc Hoaglin. On the 18th May 2005, the night before Revenge Of The Sith’s cinema debut, Hoaglin rather ill-advisedly uploaded the film to a file-sharing website.
Revenge Of The Sith was, of course, one of the most talked-about films of 2005. The final chapter in George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy, it would chart the dramatic fall of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and his final transformation into Darth Vader. Even though the critical and fan reaction to Lucas’ first two prequels had been mixed, there was still the lingering hope that the Star Wars creator could end his story on a high.
Certainly, all the fan excitement might explain why, roughly a week before Revenge Of The Sith released in cinemas, a 28 year-old chap named Albert Valente went to the huge risk of sneaking a workprint of the film out of the California post-production company that employed him. Court documents don’t record exactly which firm Valente worked at – it could have been any one of the numerous studios contracted to work on the effects-heavy Episode III – but what’s clear is that Valente was essentially the patient zero in a long chain of people that led to the film’s appearance online about a week later.
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Valente, kicking off an illicit game of pass-the-parcel, lent the Revenge Of The Sith disc to a friend, Jessie Lumada, who in turn gave it to Ramon Valdez – the worker partly responsible for circulating it around the aforementioned Champion Broadband.
Unfortunately for the eight people involved, the US government had begun a new drive to crack down on piracy in 2005. The friendly-sounding Family Entertainment and Copyright Act had been signed into law by then-president George W Bush that April, in response to the rising number of films, TV shows and other media that had begun appearing on file-sharing websites.
FBI agents came hammering on the door of Marc Hoaglin’s Huntington Beach home within hours of him clicking the ‘upload’ button. Only the second person to be convicted under that new law, Hoaglin was narrowly beaten into courts by another case in which the culprit had recorded the films Bewitched and The Perfect Man and then uploaded the files to a torrent site.
With Hoaglin arrested, the agents were then able to work backwards through the various hands the Star Wars discs had passed through. Most of the eight arrested, including Jessie Lumada and Joel Dimaano, got off with relatively small fines and probation; because he was the one who’d uploaded it to the web, Hoaglin alone faced a felony charge. Facing a maximum of three years in prison, Hoaglin instead pleaded guilty in exchange for a lighter, one month sentence.
As the charges were handed down in September 2005, MPAA chairman Dan Glickman struck a jubilant tone. “The Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith movie pirate network today got a taste of just how serious a crime movie piracy is,” Glickman said in a statement that sounds much funnier if you imagine it in the voice of Darth Vader. “There will be no sequel in their charade.”
Not that the arrests stopped the Revenge Of The Sith piracy. It was reported at the time that around 16,000 people had downloaded Hoaglin’s copy of the film before it could be taken down again. Two days after the Star Wars sequel debuted in cinemas, the BBC reported that thousands of counterfeit ROTS DVDs had been found in a Kuala Lumpur warehouse during a police raid. It was thought the stash of discs was on the cusp of being shipped from Malaysia to Europe.
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When it came to piracy, the advent of file sharing sites meant that pirated media could travel further and at greater speed than at any other point in human history. In the years after the Revenge Of The Sith incident, similar leaks occurred; in 2009, a workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, its VFX still unfinished, somehow made its way out of 20th Century Fox’s offices. A man named Gilberto Sanchez saw a copy of it for sale on a New York street corner one day, bought it, then uploaded it to a file sharing site. He too received a visit from the FBI.
High-profile arrests over pirated media continued in the years that followed. Such films as American Gangster, Zombieland and The Expendables 3 were all leaked online before their release; one particularly unusual case involved JJ Abrams’ sci-fi adventure, Super 8. When a DVD screener of the film appeared on the web, lawmakers soon noted that the file was watermarked with the name, ‘H. Stern’ – an undisclosed member of shock jock Howard Stern’s staff had, it turned out, decided to rip the data from the disc and upload it to a file sharing site.
Law agencies continue to play whack-a-mole with media piracy to this day. In August 2024, what was described as “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world,” was shut down in Vietnam. It’s thought that billions of people had visited the operation’s chain of websites before they were eventually shut down that year. With so many movies appearing on one streaming service or another within days of their cinematic release, it’s now seemingly easier than ever for films and TV shows to be stolen and shared in various corners of the web.
Exactly how much economic damage piracy metes out on the entertainment industry has long been debated. In 2005, one consulting firm estimated that internet piracy of Revenge Of The Sith may have cost Lucasfilm around $672m, though it wasn’t explained how they arrived at that extraordinary figure.
However that number was worked out, Lucasfilm still just about turned a profit in the end. Making over $868m in cinemas, Revenge Of The Sith became the second highest-grossing film of 2005.
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