How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

by Stephen Witt

  First, there were 1,000 albums. Then 10,000. Then 100,000. Ellis the elitist presided over it all. It was a beautiful thing: no low-quality encodes, no fakes, no dupes, no movies, no TV shows. Just music. All of it, in perfect digital clarity. All the music ever recorded.

  CHAPTER 14

  The heat from The Fix leak died off quickly. Plant management didn’t seem to suspect Glover, nor his confederates. Chaney Sims, the busted smuggler, stayed quiet, as did Glover’s bootleg DVD customers. He continued to work his shifts, and the bosses warmed to him. Toward the end of 2002, he was given a promotion to assistant manager.

  It had taken a long time—much longer than at Shoney’s—but seven years of overtime shifts had finally led him to a position in management. The new job paid better, with benefits and stability. But having reached this endgame, he now found it unsatisfying, and, inevitably, his thoughts were drawn back to the Scene. If he wasn’t a secret hero to the Internet underground, then what was he? Assistant manager notwithstanding, he remained an anonymous hump in a manufacturing facility facing child support, rent, utility bills, and all the rest. Plus, he still wanted a better car.

  He was well positioned for a return to the Life. The new job took him off the factory floor and placed him in an office, where he managed the other workers and scheduled shifts for the temps. He was a participant in certain privileged conversations, had better visibility on plant security, and was tasked with controlling leaks himself. Better still, Steve Van Buren, the architect of the plant’s security regime, had been pushed aside. Following a shift in organizational thinking, he’d been moved to managing environmental and safety oversight. Plant security now reported to HR, and Glover got the sense the touchy-feely administrators there weren’t paying such close attention.

  Another factor worked in his favor. With inside access, he now understood that neither he nor Dockery had ever been targeted by plant security. The investigation into The Fix had not pointed to them. Glover—black, tattooed, and muscular—and Dockery—fat, white, and Baptist—did not fit the profiles of elite Web pirates. Their technology skills did not appear on their résumés and their supervisors didn’t understand their capabilities. In this regard they had a pronounced and permanent advantage: they were beneath suspicion.

  In early 2003, after a hiatus lasting just a few months, Glover reconnected with Kali. He wanted back in. After some discussion, the two reached an agreement. Glover would continue providing albums, but Kali would have to be more patient. He’d have to wait to distribute the leaks until the discs had left the plant and made their way to the regional warehouses. It was a counterintelligence strategy, basically: to find the source of the leak, Universal would have to investigate their whole supply chain, not just the Kings Mountain plant.

  Kali reluctantly agreed. He didn’t want Glover to get caught, but he was worried that if they waited too long to leak, some other release group would scoop them and they wouldn’t get credit. Glover’s absence had created a vacuum, and RNS’ rivals had been regaining the ground they’d lost after being pummeled for the last two years. Scene groups like EGO and ESC were scoring high-profile leaks in pop and rock, and even beating RNS on its home turf of rap and R&B. With Glover out of commission, RNS had missed the 8 Mile soundtrack when it came through the plant. They’d missed Beyoncé’s solo debut. They’d missed Mariah Carey’s Charmbracelet. Worst of all, they’d missed R. Kelly’s Chocolate Factory, despite having a leaked CD in hand from another source. Throttled by a slow cable modem, they had lost the distinction of leaking the remix to “Ignition”—the best song of the decade—by a matter of seconds.

  The rival groups’ sources tended to be further down the supply chain. They didn’t have reliable inside men, and Kali suspected they were paying off corrupt record store employees for storeroom access. Still, that meant they could post leaks up to a week in advance, and RNS couldn’t let them get too close. Three weeks early and Glover would get caught; one week early and someone could scoop them. Two weeks was the sweet spot. Under their new agreement, Glover would leak his stuff to Kali as soon as he could, but Kali would then delay releasing it to the topsites. During that grace period, Kali alone would have the most up-to-date music library on earth.

  This agreement in place, Glover went into overdrive, and the discipline he brought to his professional life he now brought to the Scene. From 2003 onward he was once again the leading source of prerelease music in the world, but he surpassed even his former accomplishments. From his management position, he carefully scheduled shifts for his best leakers, the ones with the biggest belt buckles. The smugglers responded with improved tradecraft, and in handoffs far from the plant, Glover was soon receiving eight or nine different albums at a time, tied off in a surgical glove. In a new twist, one of his conspirators started bringing in microwaveable lunches. The lunches came in a plastic cylindrical bowl, the mouth of which was just slightly larger than a compact disc. Every day after eating, his confederate would wash the container clean, then bring it back to the factory floor and jam it full of discs. Then, in the bathroom, he’d reseal the lid with a glue stick, and smuggle his “uneaten” lunch back out through the guardhouse.

  Glover’s leaks once again catapulted RNS to the top of the piracy league tables. He kicked off 2003 by leaking 50 Cent’s official debut Get Rich or Die Tryin’, which would go on to be the bestselling album of the year. He followed that up by leaking albums from Jay-Z, G-Unit, Mary J. Blige, Big Tymers, and Ludacris, before ending the year on a high note by leaking Kanye West’s debut, The College Dropout. Anything that Doug Morris signed, Dell Glover leaked, and, in what was becoming RNS’ signature move, all of the leaks hit the Internet precisely 14 days before they were due in stores.

  Using Glover’s high-profile scores, Kali leveraged the RNS mystique, poaching aggressively from rival groups around the world. He picked up “Darkboy,” the former head of a rival group; “Yeschat,” a nü metal enthusiast who claimed to sell crack to finance his leaking habit; “Tank,” a Swedish IT administrator who ran RNS’ European topsite servers; “Srilanka,” a French DJ with connections inside that country’s electronic music scene; and “Incuboy,” two Italian brothers sharing a single chat handle, who ran some kind of “music promotion” business with connections inside Bertelsmann and EMI.

  Best of all, he enlisted “Da_Live_One.” Patrick Saunders was an archetypal Scene participant who had been cracking software since the dial-up days. Raised in the suburbs of Baltimore, he had shown an early interest in computers, and this had been encouraged by his mother. At 16, he’d spent two days downloading a cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop over the dedicated dial-up connection she’d arranged for him. He hadn’t paid for software since.

  The first thing you noticed about Saunders was that he never stopped talking. He spoke with animation and at great volume, though his mind was scattered and he never spent more than a few minutes on the same topic. He was black, with light brown skin, freckles, and wooly, matted hair. He wore a thin goatee and chain-smoked American Spirit cigarettes. His motivation as a pirate was almost entirely ideological. He didn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property and ran the open-source operating system Linux on his desktop. He didn’t care about popular music either. He listened only to house, and the only thing he cared about was the rarity of the release date.

  Saunders had been a member of one Scene group or another since high school. He had matriculated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 1997, but dropped out several months before graduating. From there he’d fallen in with New York City’s underground club scene and met several employees of Black Entertainment Television. A division of Viacom, the same corporate entity that ran MTV, the channel leaked like a colander. Through his connections there, Saunders scored a number of high-profile leaks.

  He’d started out in Old Skool Classics, a minor group that focused primarily on archival releases from the ’70s. From there he’d joined RNS’ rival EGO. After his leaks
drew attention, he’d been approached by Kali with an invite. Saunders was pleased. Kali had considerable prestige, and simply chatting with him online was a rare privilege. RNS invites were rarer still—the Scene’s version of getting into Harvard. Once Saunders joined the group, he immediately proved his value with two big gets. First he managed to sneak a burned CD-R of Outkast’s double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below from inside Viacom headquarters. Then he leaked Britney Spears’ In the Zone by finding an advance copy for sale on eBay.

  By 2004, on the strength of Kali’s recruitment campaign, RNS had the best rap leakers and the best rock leakers. Through Glover, they leaked Jay-Z’s The Black Album and Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter, and Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi, all exactly 14 days early. But they also leaked albums from British pop-rockers Coldplay (X&Y, four days early), downtown garage-rockers the Strokes (Room on Fire, one week early), Hawaiian frat-rocker Jack Johnson (On and On, three weeks early), Canadian douche-rockers Nickelback (The Long Road, three weeks early), and Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Rós (Takk, one week early).

  RNS began releasing albums in every genre to every conceivable audience: hicks (Toby Keith’s Honkytonk University), hipsters (Beck’s Guero), metalheads (Corrosion of Conformity’s In the Arms of God), mallgoths (Evanescence’s Fallen), soccer moms (James “You’re Beautiful” Blunt’s Back to Bedlam), and scene queens (Björk’s Medúlla). They leaked Coheed and Cambria and System of a Down. They leaked Kenny Chesney and Incubus. They leaked the Foo Fighters and Kelly Clarkson. They leaked Kenny G’s The Greatest Holiday Classics. They leaked The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie soundtrack.

  Kali’s ambitions had expanded, but the group’s ascendancy came during a period of increased attention from law enforcement. A second round of raids conducted in April 2004 had netted over a hundred people in more than a dozen countries. Among the targets was the Apocalypse Production Crew, who had in earlier times been one of the biggest players in the Scene. But then Kali had poached their leader and, bereft of direction, APC had become so marginal that RNS no longer even considered them rivals—their biggest leak of 2004 had been an album by Melissa Etheridge. Now 18 APC members were facing felony-level conspiracy charges.

  The raids prompted changes to the Scene. A second high council of piracy was convened, with all the major leaking groups in attendance. In some dark corner of the Internet, the “other RIAA” hashed out new leaking standards, new technical specifications for mp3 encodings, and a new regime of security countermeasures for “official” groups. Groups took a second look at their topsite permissions, and ordered security directives to their members. These changes were easy to agree upon but difficult to implement. While RNS had a formal command structure, a hierarchy of titles, and delegated areas of specific responsibility, Kali’s authority didn’t extend to the physical world. And this raised an interesting question: how did one actually “lead” an anonymous quasi-criminal Internet cabal anyway?

  The answer was through the chat channel. In the wake of the raids, Kali moved #RNS off the public servers and onto a home computer in Hawaii, hosted by a member named “Fish” (he kept aquariums). The chat channel was password encrypted and login permissions were restricted. Fewer than fifty IP addresses in the world were permitted to access it. From a technical perspective, then, control of the group belonged to anyone with the power to edit these login permissions. These elites had “operator” status in the chat channel, which was designated by the appearance of the @ symbol next to the participant’s name. That’s how you could tell “@Kali” was the leader—he was the one with the seashell.

  But Kali wasn’t the only participant with operator status. Fish, who owned the computer, also had control. So did a presence named “@KOSDK,” who ran the channel in Kali’s absence. KOSDK was the only other member of the group Glover communicated with on a regular basis, and, like some online version of Clark Kent, he never seemed to appear in the channel at the same time as Kali. Indeed, for a while Glover suspected that KOSDK and Kali were one and the same.

  In time he rejected this idea. The personality behind the screen name was too distinct. Patrick Saunders also interacted with KOSDK frequently, and he too was certain that this was a different person from Kali and not just a manifestation of the same deity. KOSDK hailed from Tulsa, Oklahoma, had mainstream musical taste, lived a rural lifestyle, and had moved into the ripping coordinator position after Simon Tai had stepped away. Saunders affectionately referred to him as “the Farmer.”

  In theory, then, @Fish, @KOSDK, and @Kali all held equal power in the group. In practice, it was Kali who issued the orders. Nevertheless, such a diffuse power system would not have been possible in the real world—it was a function of the anonymous nature of Internet group dynamics. Participants in RNS spent thousands of hours in chat channels together, but were under strict instructions not to reveal personal details like birthdays and real names. Identity was nebulous and not persistent. One created one’s screen name anew with each chat room login, and this could even be changed in-session with a simple command. Thus Kali wasn’t always “Kali.” Sometimes he was “Blazini” or “Lonely.” Sometimes he was simply “Death.”

  While the group could hide itself behind encryption and aliases, it could hardly mask the destructive effect it was having on the recording industry’s revenues. This brought attention too, and journalists were starting to poke around the fringes of the music-leaking Scene. A December 2004 article in Rolling Stone was the first ever mention of RNS in the mainstream press. “CD Leaks Plague Record Biz,” read the headline. “In a four-day period, one group leaked CDs by U2, Eminem and Destiny’s Child,” read a caption below. Bill Werde’s article only briefly surveyed the damage the group was causing, but it included an ominous sentence: “A source close to Eminem said the rapper’s camp believes Encore was leaked when it went to the distributors, who deliver albums from the pressing plants to chain stores such as Wal-Mart.”

  Werde’s source inside Eminem’s camp was wrong. The CD hadn’t come from the distributor; it had come from the pressing plant itself. Glover had leaked Encore and, just three days later, U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. (Destiny Fulfilled had come from the Italians.) But the press was getting closer to two of RNS’ best assets, and it was the kind of attention Kali didn’t need. Already spooked by the Operation Fastlink raids, he began a focused campaign of counterintelligence.

  First he stripped the group’s NFO files of any potentially damaging information. These files were RNS’ release notes, and they had once acted almost like newspaper mastheads, listing the group’s command structure and the person credited with the source of the leak. Now they didn’t even list the name of the group. Stripped of the weed leaf and the smoke trails, they became cryptic valentines to the recording industry that featured just two lines of information: the date the album was leaked and the date it was due in stores.

  Kali pruned the group of deadweight, kicking out marginal contributors and hangers-on. He directed all communication through the encrypted chat channel, and banned insecure methods like AOL Instant Messenger and email. He issued a blanket prohibition on all interactions with members of rival groups, particularly anyone known to have been a member of APC—he suspected the Feds would try to flip someone in that group to get to his. He reiterated the command that no logs were to be kept of any of the group’s chats, under any circumstances, ever.

  Most important, he reasserted the prohibition against physical bootlegging. This was a headache the group didn’t need. Once an album was uploaded, the compact disc it was sourced from was to be destroyed immediately, and any local copies of the files deleted. No Scene material of any kind was to ever be encoded as physical media, and for-profit sales were forbidden absolutely. The prohibitions had teeth, and in late 2004 a member named “Omen” was booted from the group after he confessed to bootlegging. This attitude was encouraged by the constituent members of the “other RIAA,” and was spelled out explicitly in one of their internal
documents: “If you like the release then please go out and buy it. We are not here to line the pockets of bootleggers.”

  Yeah, right. Dell Glover was not trading in these moral ambiguities. He thought Kali was paranoid—a natural response to persecution perhaps, but one compounded by the aftereffects of his medical marijuana prescription. The two talked on the phone three or four times a week now, but they weren’t exactly friends. Their relationship was icy and uncertain, and, from his position of social isolation in the group, it was Glover alone who best knew Kali’s wrath, frustrations, ambitions, and desires. Most of all, Glover knew that while Kali might eject some small-time bootleggers for show, there was no way he was touching “ADEG.” Kali needed him desperately, and, like a jealous lover, feared losing him to some other group. Operator status notwithstanding, Glover had the upper hand.

  So he didn’t follow the Scene rules. He used AOL IM when he felt like it. He kept a duffel bag full of leaked CDs in his closet. He didn’t buy albums anymore, and he wasn’t interested in earning brownie points from some Internet nerd cabal. He only cared about topsites. The more he could join, the more leaked movies he could get. The more leaked movies he could get, the more DVDs he could sell.

  The movie man was back. In addition to Shelby and Kings Mountain, he branched out into Charlotte. He moved 300 discs in a good week. That was 1,500 dollars cash, no taxes. The price of DVD spindles was dropping rapidly, his supply of movies came for free, and his margins were swelling as fast as his pockets.