Report: Feds Demand Prison For GUNS N' ROSES Uploader
March 14, 2009, 15 years ago
Wired.com correspondent David Kravets has filed the following report:
Feds Demand Prison For Guns N' Roses Uploader
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are pursuing a 6-month prison term for a Los Angeles man who pleaded guilty in December to one misdemeanor count of uploading pre-release Guns N' Roses tracks, according to court documents.
Kevin Cogill was arrested last summer at gunpoint and charged with uploading nine tracks of the Chinese Democracy album to his music site — antiquiet.com. The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts.
The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.
"Making a pre-release work available to the worldwide public over the internet where it can be copied without limit is arguably one of the more insidious forms of copyright infringement," prosecutor Craig H. Missakian wrote in court documents. "That is because once released it is virtually impossible to prevent unlimited dissemination of the work."Go to this location for the full story.
