A 22-year-old “fashion-obsessed” community college student from Ohio had his home raided by the FBI after he downloaded more than 1,100 files — many of them hi-res images — from a Condé Nast server last summer.
The student, Ross Ulrich, told the Smoking Gun federal agents executed a search warrant at his parents’ Columbus home earlier this year, but have yet to charge him with a crime.
Ulrich told the site he downloaded the images so he could be the first to post them online. He said he did not pay for access to the sites. (Jezebel called him “an enthusiast, who went too far,” which seems about right.)
Condé Nast filed a copyright lawsuit against the user of an IP address that was eventually tied to Ulrich.
Ulrich told TSG he agreed to pay Condé Nast $12,500 to settle the copyright claim.
Ulrich, who is studying graphic design, “also copped to accessing a Warner Bros. server holding images and clips from a variety of movies in production.” Warner Bros. filed a similar, federal lawsuit last year citing the same IP address, though Ulrich said he “believes that the film company had decided not to further pursue its civil action.”
Click here to read excerpts from the lawsuits filed by Warner Bros. and Condé Nast.
