A California man has been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for running three Sacramento-area video stores offering mostly pirated music and movies for sale or rental.

The jig was up for 46-year-old defendant Yan Akhumov in July 2009, when local police responded to a disturbance at one of his Music Land shops. An angry customer caused a commotion and wanted her money back when the DVDs she rented did not play, and the discs themselves looked like forgeries, according to court documents.

A federal judge ordered Akhumov earlier this week to surrender to federal prison authorities in September — an ordeal he could have avoided had he only listened to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Instead, he ended up pleading guilty to one count of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works. (.pdf)

FBI agents had visited one of his stores in 2007, and warned him to stop selling and renting unauthorized works. As it turned out, he had eventually burned some 55,000 discs and dressed them with low quality artwork and packaging.

“Some of the DVDs were labeled simply with a black permanent marker and none of the cases contained security seals like the packaging on legitimate product released by the motion picture industry,” a Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy said in a court filing. Other discs, the deputy said, had a “white paper label with the title typed in blue printer ink.” (.pdf)

An investigator with the Recording Industry Association of American and the Motion Picture Association of America verified that the discs were not authorized, according to court documents.

The authorities said they seized more than 32,000 counterfeit DVDs and more than 23,000 bogus CDs. The defendant faced up to five years in prison.

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