Napster lasted barely two years, in its original incarnation, but at its peak the service claimed more than seventy million registered accounts, with users sharing more than two billion MP3 files a month. Music piracy became to the early two-thousands what drug experimentation had been to the late nineteen-sixties: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought for consequences. Napster lost the lawsuit, appealed, and lost again.
In July, , facing a court order to stop enabling the trade of copyrighted files, Napster shut down its service. That legal victory achieved little. Former users of Napster saw Internet file-sharing as an undeniable prerogative, and instead of returning to the record stores they embraced gray-market copycats of Napster, like Kazaa and Limewire.
By , global recording-industry revenues had fallen from their millennial peak by more than fifteen per cent. The losing streak continued for the next decade. The R. But civil suits against the peer-to-peer services took years to move through the appeals courts, and the R.
To some at the music labels, Congress seemed disinclined to help. Leaking was viewed differently. No one was advocating for the smuggler. So album leakers adhered to a rigid code of silence. Civil litigation against such actors was impossible: unlike Kazaa, RNS did not have a business address to which a subpoena could be sent. Only criminal prosecutions would work. It became the bestselling U. In April, , the F. They tried to infiltrate the Scene, and tracked the leaked material and its dissemination throughout the Internet.
Their research began to point them to one increasingly powerful crew, RNS, and they shared their findings with the F. Journalists poked around the fringes of the Scene, too. The information was wrong. He instructed members to communicate only through this channel, which was encrypted, banning methods like AOL Instant Messenger.
And he reasserted the prohibition against physical bootlegging. He used I. All he cared about was topsites. The more he could join, the more leaked movies he could get, and the more DVDs he could sell. In a good week, Glover on his own might sell three hundred disks, and make fifteen hundred dollars in cash.
Now he began to branch out. At the beginning of each week, he dropped off four hundred disks at each of three trusted barbershops in Shelby. At the end of the week, he returned to collect his share of the profits—roughly six hundred dollars a week per shop. His best salesman made more selling bootleg movies than he did cutting hair. Seeing the profits Glover was earning, other bootleggers began moving into his territory. But Glover retained a pronounced edge. There were current DVDs, plus the latest copies of games, music, software, and more.
At the time, video on demand was the technology of the future, but, if you knew Glover, it had already arrived. He was running a private Netflix out of his house. Glover began to make extravagant purchases. He bought game consoles and presents for his friends and his family. He bought a new off-road quad bike, then a second. He bought a used Lincoln Navigator, and upgraded it with xenon headlights, a hood scoop, and an expensive stereo. In , RNS leaked four of the five best-selling albums in the U.
The No. RNS leaks quickly made their way onto public file-sharing networks, and, within forty-eight hours of appearing on the topsites, copies of the smuggled CDs could be found on iPods across the globe. By the end of , Glover had leaked nearly two thousand CDs. He was no longer afraid of getting caught.
Universal had sold its compact-disk-manufacturing holdings, which allowed the company to watch the deterioration of physical media from a comfortable distance. Although still on contract to print music for Universal, the new ownership treated the plant like a wasting asset, and stopped investing in maintenance. Although RNS was still wildly successful, many of its members were tiring of its activities.
When the group started, in , most of the participants were teen-agers. Now they were approaching thirty, and the glamour was fading. They outgrew their jobs at college radio stations or found more lucrative fields than music journalism, and lost their access to advance albums. Listening to hundreds of new releases a year could lead to a kind of cynicism. The musicians all used Auto-Tune to pitch-correct their voices; the songwriters all copied the last big hit; the same producers worked on every track.
Tony Dockery had been born again, and listened primarily to gospel. Even Kali seemed a little bored. Glover had been thinking about retiring from the Scene. He started leaking when he was in his mid-twenties. He was now thirty-two.
He had worn the same haircut for ten years, and dressed in the same screen-print T-shirts and bluejeans, but his perception of himself was changing. He found his Grim Reaper tattoo impossibly stupid. Leaks from the Scene were now publicly available within seconds of being posted to the topsites, and even those who were technologically challenged could figure out how to download them.
Glover began to make his feelings known to Kali. Between foreign law enforcement, the F. Kali understood the lengths to which law enforcement was willing to go. Some of the targets of the raids were his friends, and he had visited them in federal prison.
Kali ordered the group shut down. Dozens of former members flooded into the chat channel to pay their respects. Dockery, logging in as St.
James, started changing his handle, over and over, in tribute to former members. Though this was no longer as profitable for Glover, his desire for free media was undiminished. After RNS was shut down, he had continued sourcing and leaking albums, attributing the leaks to nonsense three-letter acronyms that bewildered even Scene veterans.
In the summer of , he contacted Glover and told him that there were two more leaks they had to have: new albums by 50 Cent and Kanye West, both with the same release date. The rappers were competing over whose album would sell more copies, and the feud had made the cover of Rolling Stone. But, as Kali probably knew better than anyone, both artists were distributed and promoted by Universal. What looked like an old-school hip-hop beef was actually a publicity stunt designed to boost sales, and Kali was determined to get involved.
The official release date was September 11, , but the albums were first pressed at the plant in mid-August. Glover obtained them through his smuggling network and listened to both. Glover enjoyed both albums, but he was in an unusual position: he had the power to influence the outcome of this feud. Glover decided that he would release one album through Kali and the other through RickOne. He offered RickOne the Kanye West album. Universal officially released the albums on Tuesday, September 11th.
Despite the leaks, both sold well. Kanye won the sales contest, even though Glover had leaked his album first. But Glover was happy with the outcome. On Wednesday, September 12th, Glover went to work at 7 P. He had a double shift lined up, lasting through the night. He finished at 7 A. As he was preparing to leave, a co-worker pulled him aside.
In the dawn light, Glover saw three men in the parking lot. As he approached his truck, he pulled the key fob out of his pocket. Then he pressed the remote, the truck chirped, and the men drew their guns and told him to put his hands in the air. They informed Glover that the F. In his front yard, half a dozen F. He found an F. His efforts had finally led him to this unremarkable ranch house in small-town North Carolina.
He introduced himself, then began pressing Glover for information. Vu was particularly interested in Kali, and Glover gave him the scattered details he had picked up over the years. Vu had anticipated the possibility of such a call and had instructed Glover to act as if nothing had happened. Glover now had a choice to make.
He could play dumb, and further the investigation of Kali. Or he could warn him off. In the next few months, the F. They also found the man they believed to be Kali, the man who had cost the music industry tens of millions of dollars and transformed RNS into the most sophisticated piracy operation in history: Adil R.
Cassim, a twenty-nine-year-old Indian-American I. On September 9, , Glover arrived at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, and was indicted on one count of felony conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. At his indictment, Glover saw Adil Cassim for the first time. Cassim was clean-shaven and wore his hair cropped short. Skip to Main Content. A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.
Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions. It has been shown that attackers can exfiltrate data from air-gapped networks by sending acoustic signals generated by computer speakers, however this type of covert channel relies on the existence of loudspeakers in the air-gapped environment.
One option, though only accessible to artists of a certain stature, is having someone from iTunes come into the studio to upload the record straight to the store, cutting out the distributor in the process. Majors are smarter about this sort of thing that they used to be. There are also emerging subscription systems like Drip, which has been embraced by Ghostly International and Domino. This was followed by tens of posts repeating the value that Drip was bringing to users and them not wanting to see it go away.
Nobody quite seems to know. We buy a lot of music and we pirate a lot of music. I do think you can build supporting fans out of free, stolen music.
So I have to try to support that, and the best way to beat it is make great physical product and make it available across the big digital platforms. We also have these big fan reward projects like the Advent Calendar that I think make people fight for us and support our releases. She freely accepted that, had that happened to her, it would have been heartbreaking, because even though her record leaked in low quality, at least the songs were effectively finished.
Releasing records is often about so much more than just the music. It might have been messier…. My gut reaction was immediately like that.
0コメント