Morris was amenable to the deal, as he was bearish on Carter’s career. The rapper’s last two albums hadn’t sold that well, and he was approaching a certain age where the commercial viability of all musicians seemed, irrevocably, to decline. Morris had experience with this—he’d pursued a lot of big artists on the declining side of fame. One of his first big signings, way back in 1980, had been Pete Townshend at Atlantic Records. Responsible for the Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, Townshend was one of the greatest songwriters in the history of rock, but in the late 1980s, after he had turned 40, the magic had dried up. When, in a frank discussion about the state of his career, Morris had asked him what was going on, Townshend had responded that he now saw the world through different eyes. Townshend explained that, when he was young, all he had wanted to do was go out and drink, party, and chase girls. Now when he thought about sex, his first thought was, “God, I hope my daughter doesn’t get AIDS.”
Morris was worried the same phenomenon was beginning to affect Carter, who in 2008 had retired his lucrative pimping persona after marrying the pop superstar Beyoncé. Music had always been a young person’s game, and the newly housebroken Carter would turn 40 soon as well. Although he normally held artists to the terms of their contracts and guarded his options on future albums jealously, Morris was, in this case, willing to make an exception.
The discussion soon turned to figures. Morris wanted six million for his stake in The Blueprint 3. Carter was only willing to offer five. The typical negotiation would have ended somewhere in the middle, but these weren’t typical men. Soon the two came to a compromise decision: to settle the dispute over the remaining million dollars, they would flip a coin.
Even for Morris this was cavalier. Then again, he was playing with Universal’s money. Carter was paying out of his own pocket, but he had always been a gambler. And while a million dollars was for most people a life-changing amount of money, for both Carter and Morris it was a meaningless asset milestone they had long since blown by. Why not flip a coin? Despite nearly fifty years in the game, Morris had no idea what The Blueprint 3 was really worth.
Life was unpredictable, and the best projections of his accountants had never panned out. He had watched the dark horse win and seen the sure thing fail. His business had been saved by one digital technology, ruined by the next, then potentially saved again by the third. He had been the custodian, several times, for radical upheavals in American culture. More than anyone, he had a sense of what was really possible in life, and it was this boundless sense of potential that kept him eternally young.
With a million bucks at stake, Morris put his hand out, flicked his thumb, and the coin flew high into the air.
CHAPTER 19
Shortly after his arrest, Her Majesty’s Government announced its intention to prosecute Alan Ellis for conspiracy to defraud. The prosecutors contended that the bank accounts full of cash and the limited-invitation user base were all evidence that Oink was a scheme for Ellis’ personal enrichment. Ellis’ arrest came just two months after Glover’s bust in the parking lot, but there was no link between the two. They were the product of two separate investigations—Operation Fastlink in the U.S. and Operation Ark Royal in the UK.
The charges provoked a backlash. Was Ellis really a fraudster? If so, he was perhaps the most honest fraudster alive. The money laundering charges against his father were the result of investigative confusion, and had quickly been dropped. Ellis’ own paper trail showed that, although it had taken in over £200,000 in donations over three years, Oink had barely broken even, and by the end of its life had been running hosting bills of £6,000 a month. Any excess cash was stored in a “war chest,” where Ellis was budgeting it to purchase even larger dedicated servers. Although the large number of bank accounts looked suspicious, there was no evidence to show that Ellis ever spent any of the money on himself.
He was an amateur in the purest sense. He just really loved music, and technology. The users of his site matched this profile; these were fanboys, not criminals. Within 48 hours of the raid that shut down Oink, two new sites had appeared: Waffles.fm and What.cd, both run by former Oink administrators. The sites were explicitly patterned after Oink, and their Web domains resolved to the Federated States of Micronesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, respectively, although of course the sites weren’t actually hosted in these far-flung locations. Further Web traces led to shell corporations in Panama, and who was behind those was anyone’s guess. In the wake of raids on both Oink and the Pirate Bay, anonymity was critical, and the new operators were determined not to repeat Ellis’ mistakes.
Within a few years What.cd’s music archive grew to surpass even Oink’s at its peak. Among the torrents it hosted were more than 45 different versions of Pink Moon, as well as a 15-gigabyte torrent of the 154-hour, 103-CD set of Stephen Fry reading all 4,224 pages of the Harry Potter series in its entirety. Torrent traffic was cresting worldwide, and by some estimates represented as much as one-third of all prime-time Internet traffic. Whatever the Crown’s goals were in prosecuting Ellis, one thing was clear: the prosecution had no deterrent effect. To the contrary, it seemed to act like advertising for torrent technology, as a similar prosecution had for the Pirate Bay.
But for the copyright defenders this was a question of justice. After seizing the server in Holland, investigators had run it through the standard battery of forensic analysis techniques. This had led to the outing of a large number of Oink uploaders, with a particular focus on those who had managed to source prerelease material. The Crown presented this as a triumph, and the tabloids, taking officials at their word, incorrectly began to refer to Oink as “the leading source of prerelease music in the world.” (Meanwhile, the real leading source of prerelease music in the world was sitting at home in North Carolina, awaiting arraignment. His investigation still ongoing, Vu hadn’t alerted the reporters to the bust, and the only media attention Glover ever got was a single mention at the bottom of an overlooked FBI press release.)
In a handful of scattered interviews with the press before the trial, Ellis maintained his innocence. He continued to insist that running a torrent tracker did not break the law, as Oink had only provided links to pirated material and did not actually host the music itself. Even his own barrister, Alex Stein, a specialist in intellectual property cases, disagreed with this legal interpretation, and would have advised his client to plead guilty to a charge of copyright infringement. But Ellis was never charged with that crime. Instead, the prosecutors had seized upon the bank accounts as evidence that Oink was a racketeering operation, a crime that carried a prison sentence of up to ten years. Here Stein prepared a robust defense.
The proceedings opened on January 5, 2010. Making the case for Her Majesty’s Government was prosecutor Peter Makepeace, a blustery model of bewigged British pomposity whose primary legal tactic was to haul Ellis into the witness box and repeatedly call him a liar. Even as he did so, though, he betrayed his own limited understanding of the facts of the case, and at times seemed almost proud of his cluelessness. While discussing the material hosted on the site, he referred multiple times to “a band called 50 Cents,” and, after being informed that the site had migrated to Linux, he engaged in the following exchange: