Morris often had petulant episodes like this. At Atlantic in the 1980s, he had been one of the first executives to embrace the potential of MTV, and pushed his artists to shoot promotional music videos for the channel. Soon, though, he was griping that they weren’t paying him enough to air the material. So too with radio, where Morris spent millions marketing his artists, then bitched about his percentages on airplay royalties. Complaining about the terms of deals he had himself signed off on was one of his habits, and—who knows?—perhaps it was a negotiating tactic. But to his critics in the digital era, his growing inconsistency made him look befuddled and out of touch.
Still, he must have known the real problem wasn’t Apple. Somebody had to make the mp3 player, and they could hardly be faulted for making an especially good one. The real problem was the public. Consumers were breaking the law. They forked over hundreds of dollars for iPods but wouldn’t give the record industry a dime. They still, somehow, didn’t seem to understand that file-sharing was illegal.
Stupid public. Seeking to guide and instruct, by the end of 2005 the RIAA had brought educational lawsuits against 16,837 people. Almost all of the defendants were average citizens with no connection to elite pirates like RNS or Oink. They were John and Jane Download, who got their music from Kazaa and woke up one day to a court summons. Project Hubcap clogged up the courts, and soon more than half of all intellectual property cases on the federal docket in the United States were RIAA lawsuits against individual consumers. The lawsuits weren’t popular, but, the way Morris saw it, the only way the music industry could survive was if the public understood the legal hazards of file-sharing.
But while the bedroom file-sharers could be rehabilitated, the dedicated pirate was beyond hope. The Scene crews and the torrenters had to be thrown in jail, and the RIAA continued cooperating with the FBI to make this happen. There was a lot of overlap between the different Scene groups, and the 2001 raids had netted them a guy named Mark Shumaker, a Florida-based software cracker who was also the head of Apocalypse Production Crew, the dedicated music piracy group.
Most conspiracy investigations started at the bottom. This one started at the top. With Shumaker’s cooperation, the FBI set up a new “honeypot” server, similar to the one it had used in Operation Buccaneer. This false topsite, nicknamed “Fatal Error,” ran for more than a year, ensnaring nearly every member of the group. In April 2004, the Bureau moved, arresting 18 members of APC in coordinated raids. The conspirators were mostly basement dwellers with limited inside access. The cases of Bruce Huckfeldt and Jacob Stahler were typicaclass="underline" two 22-year-old Iowa roommates whose hobbies were beer, cage fighting, and music piracy. Neither Huckfeldt nor Stahler had a college education, nor any connection to the music industry. What they had instead were friends in low places. They’d been obtaining the leaks by bribing their way into the storeroom at Wal-Mart, to arrange a little “inventory shrinkage.”
Stahler and Huckfeldt had no priors, but the two were charged with conspiracy and faced five years in federal prison with no possibility of parole. Like nearly everyone in APC, they pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in exchange for sentencing leniency. They were brought to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to meet with Jay Prabhu, the senior counsel for the Department of Justice’s Computer Crimes Section, who was handling the government’s case.
Getting busted for music piracy was a disorienting experience. Neither man considered himself a criminal—at least, not a serious one. While both Stahler and Huckfeldt understood their actions were theoretically illegal, they thought of themselves as pranksters, not felons. Both were surprised that APC was even a target, as there were many other more visible, more damaging groups.
Adding to their confusion was their arraignment in Virginia. No member of APC actually lived in that state, none of the leaked CDs had come from there, and the FBI’s honeypot had been hosted in Florida. Prabhu explained that this was because of the crime they’d been charged with: not larceny, nor fraud, but “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.” “Conspiracy” was the key word there. The law specified that if you robbed a bank in New York, you got charged in New York. If you robbed a bank in Montana, you got charged in Montana. But if you talked about robbing a bank in New York while you were actually located in Montana, you could be charged in either state. The legal statutes specified that, when it came to conspiracy, any location where the conspiracy was furthered could be used by prosecutors as jurisdiction.
Even so, Stahler and Huckfeldt were perplexed—it wasn’t as if they’d been traveling to Roanoke to discuss leaking CDs in Des Moines. Why, then, Virginia? Because Prabhu lived there. Because it was close to the Washington, D.C., field office where Peter Vu worked. Because its jury pool pulled largely from law-abiding federal employees, and because these juries tended to find defendants guilty with the highest frequency of any federal jurisdiction in the country. And because, once, years earlier, while chatting over AOL Instant Messenger, Stahler and Huckfeldt’s conversations had been routed through a fiber-optic pipe to an AOL server in Falls Church, Virginia, and this had triggered an electronic impulse that had lasted for a fraction of a millisecond. That momentary impulse was all it took to meet the legal definition of “furtherance.” When it came to a digital conspiracy, jurisdiction was anywhere the Department of Justice wanted it to be.
In Alexandria, Stahler and Huckfeldt were called to meet with Prabhu separately, but both recalled the same tableau. The DOJ senior counsel was an overweight South Asian who wore a goatee and orthopedic shoes. On one side of him was an American flag, and on the other a picture of President George W. Bush. Behind him, in the middle, was a whiteboard. On the whiteboard was diagrammed the chain of command for the true targets of Operation Fastlink: the Rabid Neurosis crew. At the top of the diagram, written in marker, was the name “Kali.”
Prabhu grilled Huckfeldt and Stahler about RNS. Did they know anyone in the group? No. Could they get access to any of their topsites? No. How were they getting their material? We don’t know, sir. They run a tight ship, sir. They don’t talk to us, sir. The only thing we really know about them is that, around 1999, they starting beating us with leaks, and we’ve never been able to catch up.
Prabhu was insistent. Each meeting lasted more than two hours, and he returned to the same questions again and again. But Huckfeldt and Stahler weren’t bluffing—they really didn’t know anything about RNS. Prabhu was undeterred. RNS might be good, but they couldn’t be flawless. If they didn’t know anything, there had to be someone who did.
For Universal, the APC bust was small consolation. These weren’t the main guys. These guys were small fry. They didn’t affect sales. And, meanwhile, the company was having legal troubles of its own. There was this hard-ass attorney general in New York State by the name of Eliot Spitzer who’d been threatening an investigation into the entire music business, citing evidence of record industry “payola.” Spitzer had produced a trove of embarrassing documents, leaked from inside, that he said showed a systematic program of bribery, with industry promoters paying cash to radio DJs to get their songs on the air.