## Facts

- Daniel Dove was convicted of criminal copyright infringement for his role in an online piracy group known as “Elite Torrents,” active around 2004–2005.
- The group facilitated free downloading of copyrighted movies, music, and software by requiring members to make copyrighted files on their own computers available to others.
- At sentencing, the court addressed whether to award restitution under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act (MVRA), 18 U.S.C. § 3663A.
- The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sought roughly $47,000, calculated by multiplying an asserted 17,281 album “transfers” through Dove’s server by an average wholesale digital-album price, based on the assumption each transfer represented a lost sale.
- Lionsgate Entertainment, Inc. sought roughly $880,000, based on an estimate of its share of infringed movie copyrights allegedly distributed via Dove, without proving how many times Lionsgate titles were downloaded from Dove’s server, and likewise assuming each download displaced a legitimate purchase.
- The government supported the restitution requests.

## Issues

1. Whether the MVRA permits restitution for alleged “lost profits” in a criminal copyright case when the claimed losses are derived from assumed download counts and the premise that each infringing download equals a lost sale.
2. Whether the RIAA and Lionsgate proved, by a preponderance of the evidence, actual, reasonably quantifiable losses proximately caused by Dove’s offense.

## Decision

- The court denied the restitution requests as presented.
- The court rejected methodologies that treated each alleged infringing download/transfer as a lost sale without adequate evidentiary support.
- The court found the proposed figures too speculative and insufficiently tied to actual loss proximately caused by Dove’s conduct.

## Legal Principles

- MVRA restitution is compensatory and limited to a victim’s actual, provable pecuniary loss proximately caused by the offense.
- Restitution must be supported by evidence sufficient to permit a reasonable approximation; it cannot rest on conjecture or abstract loss models.
- Courts may not assume that every infringing download or transfer would have resulted in a legitimate purchase at market price.
- The government and claimed victims bear the burden to establish the amount of loss by a preponderance of the evidence.
- MVRA restitution may not function as a substitute for statutory damages or punitive monetary remedies untethered to demonstrated loss.

## Conclusion

The court refused to award MVRA restitution to the claimed copyright victims because their requested amounts relied on unsupported assumptions about download activity and sales displacement, rather than evidence of actual, proximately caused economic loss attributable to Dove.


United States v. Dove, 585 F. Supp. 2d 865 (W.D. Va. 2008)