Pioneering Music Piracy Group Suffers Another Conviction
Written by enigmax on May 23, 2008aPOCALYPSE pRODUCTION cREW (aPC) was a pioneering music piracy group, thought by many to be the first such outfit to leak pre-release mp3 files to the Internet in an organized manner. In his role as server administrator for the group, ‘Dextro’ is facing 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
Yesterday saw Barry Gitarts convicted by a jury in the Eastern District of Virginia of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.
Gitarts, aged 25, of Brooklyn, N.Y, previously operated under the alias ‘Dextro’ within the warez group aPOCALYPSE pRODUCTION cREW (aPC), thought to be first organized group to coordinate the pre-release uploading of mp3 files to the Internet. aPC were particularly successful in obtaining pre-release music CDs from music industry insiders and magazine workers.
According to evidence presented at the trial, between June 2003 and April 2004, Gitarts financed and ran a Texas-based server that the aPC group used to store thousands of music files, movies, software and video games.
“Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don’t do it,” said U.S. Attorney Rosenberg.
For his part in the operation of the group, Gitarts is facing a possible five in years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release, however he is not the first aPC member to appear in court. So far, 15 criminal convictions have been handed down to aPC members including Mark Shumaker of Florida (aka ‘MarkAlso’), a previous leader of aPC who already admitted criminal copyright infringement back in 2003. Gitarts is accused of receiving payments from Shumaker.
District Court Judge Liam O’Grady will decide Gitarts’ fate when he sentences him on 8th August 2008.
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61 Responses
“said U.S. Attorney Rosenberg.”
Time to play Vice City again :)
But seriously, this sucks.
“Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don’t do it”
Well, THAT kinda of piracy is kinda stupid anyway, because if you get caught, you´re busted.
Torrents are a lot safer…
Dumb asses…
Sorry, I ain´t got no sympathy for stupid people.
Why don’t they ever lock up the REAL thieves (e.g. Halliburton, Guinness, Enron execs) instead of filesharing kids?
Corrupt cunts…
@3
Because they’ve got money to tie cases up in court for decades, and it’s paper “victimless” crime.
Music piracy is not a crime, its a way of life.
I hope he doesnt drop the soap
@4 Hit the nail on the head!
Sadly i hate this statement. “Piracy is stealing”. So why aren’t they getting done for theft then?
Oh thats right because piracy isn’t theft. Its copyright infringement. Damn politicians don’t even know the laws within countries!
Idiots for using a U.S. based server.
1. What self-respecting group runs their own site?
2. This just goes to show that the really secure sites don’t charge money. It’s called a paper trail…all those proxies are for nothing if they can just take a peek at your bank records.
Yup, I agree about the soap there.
dont make jokes about soap. soapdrops are serious.
they may be serious but they can still be funny! I agree with the soap
@2
Actually lots of p2p-scene stuff is ‘leaked’ from the warez-scene.
BitTorrent is unsafer then encrypted ftp sites (Top Sites)
I guess feds have been following these guys for years before, they took it down.
aPOCALYPSE nOW
“Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don’t do it,” said U.S. Attorney Rosenberg.
It scares me that someone who is supposed to know the law doesn’t know that it is not stealing. They did not sell it! It is copying/sharing/redefining capitalism.
I bet he’s too old to understand. What a retard.
P.S. Why am I “Posting comments too quickly?”. I get the damn error about 4 in every 5 times I try. TF should really sort it out.
Seriously, distributing music before release is a bit too much….
is that deserving of 5 years in jail, and 250.000$ fines?
how can they possibly stop filesharing? if i have a file, its illegal for me to give it to a friend?
sure, mass distributing and profit making is questionable, but giving away half a file to someone you know, seems utterly innocent.
people need to do something
I don’t think aPC had the intention of distributing to be public. They just a bunch of kids swaping music. If you had a machine that could make an exact dupe of any object, and you made an exact copy of a BMW for yourself, just to ride around in. Did you steal that BMW?
dexter is going to get a nigger cock enema.
“Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don’t do it,” said U.S. Attorney Rosenberg.
Rofl
reply to ‘Blah Blubb’
Are you actually that stupid? If you had any understanding of how piracy networks function, you would know that release groups are the most secure form of piracy. Torrents coming at the very bottom of the table. The reason these guys get caught is because they are the source and quite sensibly the record industry is targeting them. So next time you have a stupid thought, think about it first.
> is that deserving of 5 years
> in jail, and 250.000$ fines?
What I don’t understand is why this went all the way to a trial. Plea bargaining is the common way to reduce sentencing. They’re fucked now, since they lost the trial.
“Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don’t do it,” said U.S. Attorney Rosenberg.
well if they’re stealing why are’nt they being charged with robbery?
So, what about the industry insiders and magazine workers who leaked these files in the first place? Surely it’s they that “stole” the content? aPC merely made them available. What one might call, ‘handling stolen goods’, a far less serious crime than the trumped up charges put on this poor chap.
Slap ya dads with a rubber cock tied to a stick !
http://www.freethescene.net
When will these people realise that sound cannot be owned. When we listen to something it is never the same as it was the last time you heard it, it never will be. When will the majority wake up and see that they only want control and money. The control brings more money obviously so in respect I guess it’s just about the moeny. Oh, what a surprise. Artists will still be here when they’re gone. It will most likey revert back to how it was before these scumbags moved in and took over. People go and perform their works for money, are hired to play except now they have easier and greater means of finding this work than back in say the 1600’s. Music has always been around and people have always been able to make money from it (as long as you’re not shit of course, then you don’t deserve anything and it keeps the quality of overall music high). Yes people will just be able to shove it on in their own time but that is never the same as a live show, especially if it’s more private. Their adverts are their recordings. I really hope it ends up this way.
George Bush invades 2 countries and this guy puts some songs on the internet and he is the one going to jail?
> “”Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don’t do it,” said U.S. Attorney Rosenberg.”
Take a look at what they were convicted for. Chances are it is “copyright infringement”, “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” or something like that. Not theft.
Lol @1
This sucks…
From the one hand the RIAA sneaks malware root-kits on their CDs, and from the other they applaud convictions where they can’t even show damages. Their hypocrisy is amazing.
the article has nothing to do with bittorrent or filesharing
these guys are the criminal music pirates that are so often confused with filesharers. criminal music pirates are thieves who steal the rights to music by taking the content and assuming the rights to distribute. correctly they are jailed
filesharing is not a criminal offense and has nothing to do with these thieves
If it wasnt for these types of groups we wouldnt have much to share so it has quite a lot to do with filesharing
I propose we firebomb the plaintiffs.
You may think that this is unsavory, but I think that for some martyr who is willing to sacrifice theirself is the only way to do this. Freedom must be taken, not given. How did the American revolution happen? We did not just sit around and wait for the British to change their laws. We fought for our liberties. If we do not fight now, we might as well give up and say we agree with them.
You may think that we need public sympathy, but we don’t. We just need to show our force, and to show that we are as determined as ever to stop those corporations from oppressing on our rights.
@4 : Without people like this, torrents would be a whole lot duller. So laughing at these arrests only makes you look stupid.
many of us here have no doubt benefited from this group, but where is their support now they’re all going down? Shouldn’t we all be donating to a fund of some sort, and offering other forms of solidarity?
@33
you need a history lesson
http://tinyurl.com/3c377u
@34
quoted for truth
That isn’t piracy, and has nothing to do with it. If they were selling it maybe, but I didn’t get that impression. They were electronic copies of works intended for public consumption anyhow.
They may have profited indirectly from advertising, but that’s no different to what many others legally do; social networks in particular. Everyone has to make a living, and if they want to attract people to the site they have to give them what they want and what’s popular. I’d draw the line at some things, but it seems like they had a good idea, even though it can’t work for long these days, and you can’t continue to remain anonymous.
I agree with 38 that there ought to be support funds for those harshly mistreated for sharing or distributing media files. It would only mean pennies to each user. It wouldn’t account for jail time tho.
One of my ancestors had his brothers break him out, although he was an actual crim, whereas I don’t break the law or steal.
If he is a thieving pirate then all who benefited from the files must likewise be criminals, since they received the “stolen” goods.
It follows that all PC users are just criminals who haven’t yet been caught, since every file, everything we read or comment on, although there for the taking, has a copyright attached to it.
Does this seem fair and right? Or is it specious reasoning? This is the Internet and how it works. This copyright infringement nonsense is antiquated and not designed for this age. The DMCA was hurriedly compiled and inserted into law to cater to self-interest groups, not according to public interest and reality.
Also everything is linked to something else which may “infringe copyright”, and search engines likewise, since that’s what they’re designed for.
” the article has nothing to do with bittorrent or filesharing
these guys are the criminal music pirates that are so often confused with filesharers. criminal music pirates are thieves who steal the rights to music by taking the content and assuming the rights to distribute. correctly they are jailed
filesharing is not a criminal offense and has nothing to do with these thieves”
Where do you think the stuff on the file sharing networks comes from? The file fairy?
@ 3 “Why don’t they ever lock up the REAL thieves (e.g. Halliburton, Guinness, Enron execs) instead of filesharing kids?”
-> scratch the surface a little more and soon you’ll discover the halliburton kind is the same as the majors’ kind.
Scratch a little more and you’ll see that “justice” is here to protect interests of that kind, because they feed the politicians.
And reread Orwell’s 1984. It’s a long time since the words used by politicians and officials mean exactly the contrary of their dictionary’s definition.
maybe everyone that does downloading all at once give them selves up to the law, how can they single out selected people of the group, it would screw the system up in the US as theres no way they could lock everyone up
HAHA!!! This guy Writes “Sorry, I ain´t got no sympathy for stupid people.” I Wonder if he realizes that saying “ain’t got no” makes him sound like an inbred redneck LMGDMFAO!
@ 2 thats a pretty ignorant comment dude
looks like another Jew sells out a gentile.
“Mark Shumaker of Florida (aka ‘MarkAlso’), a previous leader of aPC who already admitted criminal copyright infringement back in 2003. Gitarts is accused of receiving payments from Shumaker.” I guess Shu will receive a light sentence (if any) while Dextro could see a longer sentence then some murderers. America is such a backward quasi-communist country it ain’t funny.
I’ve been reading this site since oink went down,and have seen some pretty stupid comments,but 49,25 and especially 19 should have never made it on the site.
“Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don’t do it,” said U.S. Attorney Rosenberg.
lol, blunt
They need to worry about the gas companies and refineries that are stealing from everyone…
He is not guilty!! Let blame Earth now. Change climate weather to worst. Spill oil in ocean for fun! Let fire on trees, grasses, all building to ruin our world. Federal is very wrong! LET MESS UP now. Earth will be DOOM soon! RIAA, MPAA, Federal are very stupid to catch online for!!!! Get blamed! Iraq/Russia/China will win war to use nuclear weapons toward to against US.
I don’t get it… Why does it take an entire group to pirate mp3s? You just pop a cd into the drive and rip it. As for getting pre-release stuff… who cares? Do you really want to be the first to listen to al album THAT bad? Besides, if they release the music before it goes out in stores, how do you know that the quality wont suck. Maybe the production isn’t finished yet. I like mp3 piracy, but this group seems pretty stupid. A shame that they have to go to jail though.
Many people are going sue RIAA and MPAA. RIAA and MPAA will get busted by crowd of people to be protest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQqqtoSMAVk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deMRhF39s7I
Heaven rules!!! RIAA and MPAA can go to HELL for being sue to people. Keep download music and you will not get sued. Give people free foods, music, etc. God and Devil spirits are now watch on RIAA and MPAA what they are doing wrong. RIAA and MPAA has been warned judge by heaven. Respect people download music without problems. This report post is made in Heaven.
WTF? where my comment?
I think RIAA or MPAA is spammer to me! F*** off! I going call other country to drop bomb on US without warning. I am ready to kill RIAA and MPAA in no time. I have weapons ready. Get fight!
I found RIAA address is 1025 F ST N.W., 10th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20004. I going recall to people to ready bust RIAA building down. Throw bomb against building and RIAA will be defeat! Grrr!!!!!!!!
#2 – If it wasn’t for such “stupid people” the BitTorrent-community wouldn’t be half the size it is today. And for the record, torrents aren’t much safer, it’s the amount of users that keeps you “hidden”.
Instead of get kids jailed they should go after genocides like bushs, rumsfelds, cheneys, morgans, rockfellers, taylors, and so on.
The concept of Intellectual property is a terrorism of the mind. Its a terrorism grounded on repression of what is possible. The sooner they eradicate IP laws, the better off society as a whole will be. Sharing, copying and collaborating is as much a part of the human condition as breathing. We will not have true freedom of speech until IP laws are dismantled.
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