1/31/2003 -- Robert Keppel, the first "braindump" site owner to be criminally convicted for selling IT certification exam questions, was sentenced this morning in federal court to 12 months and 1 day in prison and ordered to pay $500,000 in restitution to Microsoft.

Judge Ronald Leighton in the United States District Court, Western District of Washington also ordered Keppel to three years supervised release after his prison term is served, and added a $100 "special assessment" that goes into the court's victim relief fund, a court spokesperson said.

Keppel pleaded guilty in August to a felony charge of theft of trade secrets in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1832(a)(2), part of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996. The charges stemmed from the sale of Microsoft certification exam questions through Keppel's now-defunct Web sites, Cheet-Sheets.com and CheetSheets.com.

The U.S. Attorney's office had asked for an 18 month prison sentence for Keppel.

Keppel's defense attorney argued for work release or probation.

An independent attorney told CertCities.com that Keppel could serve as little as four months of his sentence, depending on factors such as "good behavior." The defense could also choose to petition the judge to reconsider the sentence.

CertCities.com is attempting to contact Microsoft and Keppel's defense attorney for reaction to this verdict.

The amount of restitution Keppel was ordered to pay is in addition to assets already forfeited by Keppel, including a 1997 Ferarri Spider, a 2001 Lexis RX300 and $56,000 seized from various bank accounts.

A spokesperson for the US Attorney's office told CertCities.com that the reason the sentence was 12 months and one day is that "[the sentence] needs to be over a year [for] a felony."

Robert Pedigo, Executive Director for the Information Technology Certification Security Council (ITCSC), an industry consortium that works to preserve the security of certification exams, said that the verdict is "good news for everyone who takes a certification test honestly and for those who create and deliver those tests. It's bad news for those who would try to profit by undermining the value of certifications."

"The members of the ITCSC [which includes Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA, and others] believe that the important point is summed up by the conviction," he commented. "It demonstrates that the courts recognize the copyrights of intellectual property owners and that test theft and fraud in testing are now clearly criminal activities." -B.N.