MANHATTAN, Jan 25 — Four men were charged in two separate schemes with illegally copying and distributing copyrighted applications for Android mobile devices in a first-of-its-kind piracy case, the US Justice Department said.

Kody Jon Peterson, 22, worked with an organisation calling itself the SnappzMarket Group to reproduce and distribute more than 1 million copies of copyrighted apps, prosecutors said. Three others did the same with an organisation called the Appbucket Group, they said.

“These crimes involve the large-scale violation of intellectual property rights in a relatively new and rapidly growing market,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman said in a statement. “This represents the first counterfeit apps case by the Department of Justice.”

Peterson, of Clermont, Florida; Thomas Allen Dye, 21, of Jacksonville, Florida; Nicholas Anthony Narbone, 26, of Orlando, Florida; and Thomas Pace, 38, of Oregon City, Oregon, were charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, the US said.

Both groups rented computer servers to host websites to store pirated copies, prosecutors said. The government seized the website domain names for the apps’ marketplaces. — Bloomberg