A 29-year-old man from California has pleaded guilty to his role in a long-running warez-scene release group and now faces up to 5 years in jail. The group, called OSC, ran from 2002 until 2007 and was responsible for the pre-release of the Kanye West album Graduation. It’s connections to ex-members of the previously busted group, Rabid Neurosis, appeared to prove fatal.
During March, Sumerian Records boss Ash Avildsen made the news on a couple of piracy-related occasions. First, he orchestrated a hoax to trick BitTorrent users into downloading a fake band promo, then later got serious with a YouTube broadside against music piracy. As Sumerian gets ready to launch their own music store, TorrentFreak has discovered that they have Long John Silver’s skeleton in the closet.
Acting on information provided by an anti-piracy group, Swedish police have carried out raids and taken down at least one warez scene topsite. Items seized include at least a dozen computers and servers containing a conservative 200 terabytes of media, mainly Hollywood movies. As other sites get sucked into the fallout, the recriminations and finger-pointing have begun.
Yesterday, police in 14 countries around Europe coordinated in raids against so-called Warez Scene topsites. Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic and Hungary all saw action. With the help of Scene insiders and other sources, today we try to piece together what happened, including which sites were hit and which ones got away.
A member of the pioneering warez group aPOCALYPSE pRODUCTION cREW (aPC) has been jailed for 18 months. Barry Gitarts, also known as ‘Dextro’, was sentenced after he was convicted of Conspiracy to Commit Criminal Copyright Infringement. Thus far, there have been 15 convictions of aPC members.
aPOCALYPSE 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.
This week, a 30 year old man was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his involvement in the so-called pirate ‘warez scene’. In what appears to be some sort of bizarre parallel universe, it’s been revealed that another notorious pirate has an interesting job – he’s chairman of the San Diego Republican Party.
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