When five FBI agents arrested Kevin Cogill at his Culver City flat, it marked the newest weapon in the amusement industry's war on plagiarization: felony charges against nickel-and-dime bootleggers.
Cogill posted nine leaked songs from an unreleased Guns N' Roses album, which has been in the whole caboodle for more than a decade, on his music blog in June. The site crashed under the traffic, and he distant the songs after a few hours when the Los Angeles-based rock band's lawyers complained.
Now he faces up to three days in prison house and $250,000 in fines. On Wednesday he became the first Californian charged under a 3-year-old federal anti-piracy law that makes it a felony to distribute a copyrighted work on computer networks before its release.
"In the past, these may have been viewed as victimless crimes," aforesaid Craig Missakian, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles world Health Organization built the case with the FBI and recording-industry investigators. "But in realness, there's significant damage. This law allows us to prosecute these cases."
Cogill, 27, was arrested Wednesday and released on $10,000 bond. He was not required to enter a plea. His public defender, Anthony Eaglin, declined to comment.
"I hope he rots in jailhouse," said Slash, the early Guns N' Roses lead guitarist. "It's going to affect the sales of the phonograph record, and it's not fair. The Internet is what it is, and you have to deal with it accordingly, but I think if someone goes and steals something, it's theft."
The entertainment industry has long fought to protect official press release dates. It contends that sales ar lost when a film or song is available free on the Internet before it hits stores. Leaked songs are often unfinished and of poor sound quality.
Pre-release piracy "pops the balloon," said Eric German, a partner with Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp who has represented the recording industry in piracy cases. "It rips up the lottery ticket. It takes the wind out of everything."
The Recording Industry Assn. of America has long relied on polite lawsuits to combat piracy. But the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 gave it a new malleus -- felony charges with stiff penalties for posting even one song before its release.
The law has been secondhand only a few times, mostly to tackle large commercial piracy rings. But in 2006, two people were charged with distributing a reading of a Ryan Adams & the Cardinals album, "Jacksonville City Nights," on the Internet before it hit stores. They were sentenced to two months of house arrest and two years' probation.
Fans of Guns N' Roses take experienced a long drouth of new recorded real. Led by lead isaac M. Singer Axl Rose, the rockers have been working on their record album, "Chinese Democracy," on and off since the 1990s.
Cogill used to work for Universal Music and immediately works at entertainment internet site Crave Online. Writing under the call "Skwerl," he uses his blog, Antiquiet, to talk about American politics and the music industry.
In early June, he expressed his appreciation for Guns N' Roses, noting that he had waited half his life for a new album.
"The more than you [mess] around with the inside information, the more likely the album is to news leak on the Internet, spoiling whatever prominent plans you're cooking up anyway," he wrote, addressing Geffen Records, the band's label and a unit of Universal.
On June 18, he aforementioned he had received nine-spot "Chinese Democracy" tracks from an unknown source and made them available for streaming, merely not download, on Antiquiet. He contended that if the album was upright -- and he thought it was -- it would do well financially, in malice of any leaks.
After he removed the tracks, the FBI interviewed Cogill at his office and home, seeking the source of the leaked songs.
"I've been asked if my legal troubles are over," he wrote after the FBI's visit. "The answer is that they haven't begun."
No one came to the door at Cogill's home Thursday. A man wHO answered his phone declined to distinguish himself just said Cogill wasn't granting interviews.
In an e-mail, young man Antiquiet blogger Britney Bernstein said Cogill's case was building buzz for "Chinese Democracy." "Any publicity this album gets is good publicity," she said.
The band released a statement: "Presently, though we don't support this guy's actions at that grade, our interestingness is in the original source. We can't scuttlebutt publicly at this time as the investigation is ongoing."
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