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

by Stephen Witt

  In campaign literature, the Pirates made their point in stark terms: “It is impossible to enforce the ban against non-commercial file sharing without infringing on fundamental human rights.” People—especially younger people—listened. In early 2009, Sweden held its elections for the European Parliament, and the Swedish Pirate Party garnered over 200,000 votes, enough for a 7 percent share. For the next five years, two Pirates would take seats at the table of the European Union.

  Of course, the EU parliament had 751 seats, so the amount of power they actually held was microscopic. Nevertheless, it represented the first serious challenge to the theoretical and moral bases of intellectual property law in centuries. Lobbying from media industries had pushed commercial copyright statutes from their original 14-year terms to protections that could last for hundreds of years. This had diminished the public domain and left the majority of cultural products in the hands of just a few multinational corporations. The two Pirate parliamentarians, lonely though they were, sought to reverse this, pushing to reduce the length of copyright to just five years and to eliminate all patents on software and biotechnology. The idea was that these changes would lead to a thriving public domain, universally accessible in the Internet era.

  It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. The trade in pirated mp3s had undeniably spurred innovation in the mobile device market, and the development of the smartphone could be traced directly back to Napster. The Pirates believed this episode was broadly applicable, and that the artificial conditions of scarcity imposed by the state were hampering innovation across a number of fields. They had noticed something else too, something even more radical: that the difficulties music executives like Doug Morris had experienced deploying capital over the past decade were shared in an increasing number of industries. In a world of digital abundance, it was getting harder to earn a profit.

  This point was later made succinctly by Izabella Kaminska, a blogger for the Financial Times, who translated the Pirates’ arguments into macroeconomic terms. Discussing the inability of the world’s central bankers to engineer growth, Kaminska outlined the precise factors that had led Morris to slash his own operating budgets by more than 50 percent:

  Negative rates are a function of global abundance (brought on by technological advances), and a trend that cannot be stopped even by the strongest central bank … For rates to stay positive we have to hoard almost everything in the world from the people that need it, if it is to have value. The artificial scarcity tactics that have been used through the ages to achieve this are getting harder to execute because of technological liberation—which is enabling the emergence of collaborative economy which bypasses rates of return.

  Perhaps another world was possible. But organizing it proved difficult, and only in one other country besides Sweden did the Pirate Party gain a foothold: Germany. There, it registered 30,000 members in the course of a couple of years, polling in the high single digits, winning representation in several state-level elections in 2011, and threatening to put members in the Bundestag.

  From his landed peerage at Fraunhofer, Karlheinz Brandenburg watched the rise of the German Pirate Party with disapproval. So, too, did Bernhard Grill. Though separated, the two engineers still thought along similar lines, and they both believed that the Pirate Party’s platform was economic cyanide. The Pirates’ ideas, if adopted, would radically reconfigure existing relationships of investment and profit. In this hypothetical world, companies like Microsoft and Adobe would see their revenues cut in half. Companies like Universal and Warner Music Group would go bankrupt almost immediately. Musicians, writers, and creative professionals of all kinds would be forced out of the marketplace and into relationships of patronage. And the next generation of inventors would probably become consultants.

  Brandenburg and Grill were in some ways the fathers of the Pirate Party. Their decision to release the mp3 encoder for free on the Web had catalyzed a golden age of copyright infringement that had decimated the music industry even as it made them wealthy. But that decision had also catalyzed a political movement that now threatened their own livelihoods. No software revenues meant no mp3 licensing income. No mp3 licensing income meant the German state would be out hundreds of millions, and Brandenburg’s white-on-white Ilmenau campus would still be a cow pasture.

  Both Brandenburg and Grill knew that, without the incentives of software patent revenue on the horizon, they never would have spent the better part of a decade conducting those listening tests. Brandenburg would likely have stayed in academia and sought a professorship. Grill might still be playing the trumpet. Listening to “Tom’s Diner” 2,000 times in a row was work, and the mp3 team would not have done that work without the incentive of future payoff. And that was their ultimate rebuke to the Pirates: without patent protection on software, the mp3 would never have existed.

  CHAPTER 20

  The day after his house was raided, Glover returned to work. What else was he supposed to do? He had a shift scheduled, and he hadn’t been formally charged with a crime. Pulling up to the guardhouse in his Ford, he cleared the vehicle whitelist and found a parking spot. As he emerged from the car, he was met outside the factory by Robert Buchanan, his boss.

  Buchanan had worked as a supervisor at the plant for years. He had always liked Glover, whom he found to be a capable and diligent employee. He had promoted him off the packaging line, and they had played paintball together. Now, though, it was clear that something was wrong. The FBI hadn’t contacted Buchanan, but the incident with the sheriffs had happened during a shift change, with hundreds of employees watching.

  Dell, said Buchanan, don’t come in here. You and me are friends, but you’re under investigation. I think you better go home.

  It was the last time Glover would ever set foot on the plant’s grounds. He was fired within a week. Dockery would also be fired, and within a few weeks Karen Barrett was let go. Glover’s DVD business was shut down. The FBI confiscated his computers, his duplicating towers, his hard drives, and his PlayStation. They left him the duffel bag full of compact discs—those were worthless, even as evidence.

  The conversation with Special Agent Peter Vu had been difficult. Glover had admitted to leaking the CDs, and admitted to ripping them and sending them to Kali. Vu had pressed him for information on Kali, and Glover had told him the scattered details he had picked up over the years. But Vu wanted a name, and, although he’d talked on the phone with Kali hundreds of times, Glover didn’t have one.

  Then, later that same day, Kali himself had called. His voice was agitated and nervous.

  It’s me, said Kali. Listen, I think the Feds might be on to us.

  Vu had anticipated the possibility of such a call and had instructed Glover to act on the phone as if nothing had happened. Glover now had a choice to make. He could play dumb, pull Kali in, entrap him, and seek leniency from the FBI in exchange for cooperation. Or he could warn Kali off.

  The two had a tortured history. For years they had been locked in a private, anonymous tryst away from the rest of the Scene. There had been times when they had relied on each other, times that Glover had looked forward to speaking with Kali, times he’d even thought they might be friends. But there were other times that Glover felt Kali was manipulating him and isolating him in order to maintain control. For his part, Glover had repeatedly endangered Kali’s group through his DVD bootlegging, and had betrayed him on the Graduation leak. Their complex relationship had now come down to this conversation.

  Kali, Glover said, You’re too late. They hit me yesterday. Shut it down.

  OK, I got you, Kali said. Then he said, I appreciate it. Then he hung up.

  Over the next few months the FBI would make six more raids. In addition to Glover and Dockery, they hit Patrick Saunders and Simon Tai, both in New York. They picked up Edward Mohan, 44, a radio DJ from Baltimore who had been in RNS for years. They hit Matthew Chow, 26, of Missouri City, Texas, who had worked as a low-level Tuesday ripper and designed the ASCII-art m
arijuana leaf on the group’s old NFOs. They hit Richard Montejano, also known as “RickOne,” the head of Old Skool Classics, to whom Glover had leaked Graduation. And they hit the man they believed to be Kali, the man who had personally cost the music industry tens of millions of dollars and transformed RNS into the most sophisticated piracy operation in history: Adil R. Cassim, a 29-year-old Indian-American IT administrator who smoked a lot of weed, listened to rap music, and lived at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles with his mom.

  The FBI’s investigative strategy had worked. Shaking down “J-Dawg” from APC had led Vu to an IP address for one Patrick Saunders, known to Reyes only as “Da_Live_One.” In November 2006, the FBI set up a wiretap on Saunders’ Internet traffic in Troy, New York. The wiretap originally provided nothing, as, following Kali’s orders, Saunders had encrypted all chat traffic to his box using a popular cipher called Blowfish. Vu’s team had requested counterencryption support to crack the code, but was advised by the division of the FBI that handled such things that this was impossible. Still, Vu sat on the wire for the next three months, and finally Saunders got lazy.

  In New York City for a weekend of clubbing, Saunders still felt obligated to keep up with his responsibilities to RNS. He had logged into his computer remotely using a virtual client, and chatted with a few members of the group to schedule an upcoming leak. While the outbound traffic from his computer was covered by Blowfish, inbound traffic was not, and in late 2006, after a five-year investigation, Vu could see inside the RNS chat channel for the first time.

  His victory was short-lived. Within a month Kali had shut the group down. Kali’s timing in this regard was almost perfect. Vu had gathered enough information to implicate Saunders, but not anyone else. The culture of anonymity on the chat network hadn’t given Vu much to work with. In fact, he still didn’t even know Glover existed. There was only one thing left to do: shake down Saunders. The FBI raided his Troy apartment in early February 2007. In interviews, Saunders initially denied knowing anything about the group. But the warrant permitted the Feds to seize his computer and send it to Quantico for forensic analysis. Soon the technicians found something interesting—a transcript of the #RNS chat channel from the group’s final day. Saunders, sentimental, had kept a log of it.

  Vu used this to go to work on Saunders, and with a five-year sentence looming, he soon flipped. He had been one of the most ideological members of the group, a free-software advocate who thought the copyright was an outdated legal concept from the early eighteenth century. But, as with so much self-congratulatory Internet rhetoric, this attitude disintegrated the moment it came into contact with the real world.

  Terrified of prison, Saunders proved as useful an asset to the FBI as he had once been to RNS. On March 5, having signed an agreement to cooperate in exchange for sentencing leniency, Saunders spent the day reviewing the chat channel logs from RNS’ final day with Vu. Forty-two screen handles had appeared in the chat session that day, and Saunders described everything he knew about each one. Often, this wasn’t much—maybe a general sense of location, or age, or a smattering of biographical details. Indeed, it was a point of pride for Saunders that, though he’d spent thousands of hours online with them, he didn’t know the real name of a single member of the group. Dockery’s clowning—repeatedly changing his screen handle to imitate past members of the group—made things even more confused. Still, Vu had something to work with. He advised Saunders to inform him if anyone from RNS now tried to contact him again, and sure enough, in April, Glover had messaged Saunders directly, seeking to find a way into another group.

  Saunders, looking at that message, had faced a decision as well. For the first time, he was talking to the group’s best asset, a guy kept under such deep cover that he hadn’t even been referenced in the final chat session. He knew that once Vu had this IP address, the entire network would be exposed. Every activity on his computer was being logged now, but for a minute Saunders considered somehow terminating the conversation, either by logging out immediately or perhaps kicking the cord from his computer, giving a coded message to the man he knew only as “ADEG” to stay away.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he gave the IP address to the FBI, and from that day forward IRC was for Saunders a medium of betrayal. Vu subpoenaed Time Warner’s subscriber records and soon found himself looking at the name of Bennie Lydell Glover for the first time. From there it was easy—but, had Glover walked away, as he’d intended to in January, it’s possible he might never have been caught.

  Kali, too, had proved too greedy. The nameless release group he’d started in the wake of RNS was limited to a circle of his most trusted confidants, but that circle included Glover, whose seized computer contained login credentials for Kali’s home server. That gave Vu a second Time Warner IP address, and his subpoenas soon led him to a residential account in Granada Hills, California, registered to a subscriber under the name of Bilkish Cassim—Adil’s mom.

  Finally, Vu picked up Edward Mohan, Matthew Chow, and Simon Tai. These were easy collars, as the three hadn’t taken even rudimentary steps to hide their identities. Chow in particular had been open about his involvement, and in his (admittedly unqualified) legal opinion, RNS wasn’t even breaking any laws. Vu had found him through his email address, which he’d shared with every member of the group: chow@mattchow.com.

  But the overall damage was compartmentalized. APC had lost 18 people; RNS only lost six. Kali’s emphasis on anonymity had proven prescient, and his decision to spike the group had come just in the nick of time. He hadn’t saved himself, perhaps, but he’d saved the rank and file: the Tuesday rippers, the Japanese export-hunters, the British journalists, the Italian brothers “Incuboy,” the Swedish topsite operator “Tank,” the Okie farmer “KOSDK,” the Hawaiian aquarium keeper “Fish,” “Al_Capone,” “Havoc,” “Crash,” “Yeschat,” “Srilanka” … none of them were ever found.

  The Justice Department’s statement of facts in Glover’s case made reference to the scope of the conspiracy. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Prabhu explained his position that RNS was a criminal organization, one that operated for the benefit of its members. He explained how the topsite economy provided members with in-kind benefits for sustained and deliberate copyright infringement—an arrangement that provided material rewards for breaking the law. He emphasized the way in which RNS was indeed a criminal conspiracy:

  Rather than operating as a group of friends interested in music, it operated as a business, and, rather than money, that business was designed to get access for its members of every copyrighted work that ever existed.

  In the sentencing guidelines, he made his point even more clearly:

  RNS was the most pervasive and infamous Internet piracy group in history.

  It sounded like flattery, but the numbers backed it up. RNS had leaked over 20,000 albums over the course of 11 years, numbers independently sourced to the FBI’s investigation, the RIAA’s internal tracking database, and the group’s own NFOs. During most of this reign of terror the group’s key asset was Glover, another point the FBI now well understood. His leaks had made their way through topsites across the globe, and from there to private trackers like Oink, and from there to public sources like the Pirate Bay and LimeWire and Kazaa. He was the primary source of contact for hundreds of millions of duplicated mp3 files—perhaps even billions—and, given Universal’s predominant position during this period, there was scarcely a person under the age of 30 who couldn’t trace music on their iPod back to him. He was the scourge of the industry, the hero to the underground, and the king of the Scene. He was the greatest music pirate of all time.

  He got a job at Wal-Mart. Working in the distribution center wasn’t glamorous, and the company was stingy with benefits, but as always he volunteered himself for every available overtime shift. Things began to look bleak in the months before his arraignment. He had a mortgage. He had credit card debt. Karen was pregnant again. The economy was tanking in spectacular fashion.

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bsp; But at least he had a job. In February 2009, the inevitable arrived, and the Entertainment Distribution Company declared bankruptcy. The Kings Mountain plant was shut down, hundreds of employees were laid off, and the compact disc production line was sold to buyers in Latin America. The workers filed for unemployment and faced an uncertain future amidst the worst economic crisis in modern American history. Glover, barred from interacting with his former colleagues, could only learn about the plant’s closing secondhand.

  On September 9, 2009, Glover surrendered himself to the Feds at a courthouse in eastern Virginia and was indicted on a single felony count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. A month later he pleaded guilty. The decision to plead was a difficult one, but Glover thought his chances of acquittal were poor. Fourteen years after he’d signed it, Glover’s “No Theft Tolerated” agreement from PolyGram was now admitted as federal evidence. Dockery, who loved to talk, had told Vu everything. Glover’s computers and hard drives contained volumes of incriminating evidence. And so far the FBI’s conviction rate in Operation Fastlink was 100 percent. Hundreds of convictions had been obtained, mostly through plea bargains, and the maximum penalty for copyright infringement was five years in prison. The few who had tried to fight the charges had lost.

  At his indictment in Virginia, Glover saw Adil Cassim for the first time. From the moment he lay eyes upon him, Glover was certain that this man was Kali. An unassuming presence, Cassim was clean shaven and wore his hair cropped short. He was dressed in a tasteful suit jacket and a quiet tie. He was stocky, and he packed a noticeable paunch. His skin was nearly as dark as Glover’s own.