A Pirate and His Penance

By Amanda Ripley/Hamilton, N.J. Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2004
    • If there are movies worth the risk of a felony indictment, surely The Hulk is not among them. It is a truth Kerry Gonzalez now appreciates daily. Gonzalez, 24, was an insurance underwriter in New Jersey last June: a nice kid with gelled hair, a college degree and no criminal record. Then he put a copy of The Hulk up on the Web — two weeks before it opened in theaters. Within weeks, a million people had downloaded it; movie geeks had panned the film online based on Gonzalez's copy, which had unfinished special effects; and the FBI was looking for him. Gonzalez was sentenced to six months house arrest, three years of probation and a $7,000 fine. And so he became Hollywood's perpetrator poster boy, one of the few movie uploaders to be prosecuted in the U.S. — but definitely not the last.

    For a man who has lost his job, his freedom and even his best friend because of a movie he has never seen, Gonzalez seems surprisingly accepting of his punishment. "They had to do it to someone — and it was me. So what can you do?" he says, serving up a weary smile.

    Gonzalez got his copy of The Hulk from a buddy who worked at an ad firm that had received an early work print. He didn't have much interest in the movie, but he knew that if he put it online, the more-exclusive chat groups would let him pull down other, better films. "I don't like paying for movies," he says. So he digitized the VHS copy and then used basic editing software to block the "Property of Universal" crawl running across the screen, along with a serial number. Aware that what he was doing was wrong, he vacillated for three days before posting The Hulk to a server in the Netherlands. "So many people do it, you never think you're going to get caught."

    Universal unblocked the serial code and quickly traced the copy to Gonzalez. The studio pushed for the maximum sentence of one year in federal prison, claiming the piracy had cost it an estimated $66 million (a spokeswoman declined to explain how that figure was calculated). Gonzalez now has a job selling cars. He must wear an electronic-monitoring bracelet around his ankle to ensure he goes only to work and then home. "People will come by once in a while," he says, "but I find myself watching TV and playing video games a lot of the time." He says he would like to do a public-service announcement against file sharing, but so far, Universal hasn't been interested.