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A new manager was brought in from Denmark Henning Jorgensen. He still lives in North Carolina.
something called the “crime triangle” Known in scholarly sources as “routine activity theory.” Academic criminologists skip the triangle for a Venn diagram, with crime in the middle.
They were almost all guys Of more than 100 Scene prosecutions I have researched, only two have involved female defendants. However, there was for a brief period in the 1990s a releasing group known as GLOW: “Gorgeous Ladies of Warez.”
“Could you, like, FXP me the file, dogg?” In the mid to late ’90s File eXchange Protocol was favored by IRC pirates over the more common File Transfer Protocol.
CHAPTER 9
a key driver for successful artists and businesspeople alike From Iovine’s 2013 commencement speech at USC: “But what I have learned is some of these powerful insecurities can be harnessed into life’s greatest motivator, the strongest five-hour energy drink ever. It’s called a little old-fashioned fear.”
Iovine went after Sisqo; Cohen went after Limp Bizkit Goodman, Fortune’s Fool, 141.
“Big Pimpin’” . . . Carter would himself disown it See John Jurgensen, “Just Asking: Decoding Jay-Z,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2010. He still performs the song, though.
confronted him on the floor of a nightclub and stabbed him The producer was Lance “Un” Rivera. Carter pleaded guilty to the stabbing in 2001 and was sentenced to three years’ probation.
The estimated cost from 1995 to 2000 was half a billion dollars A coalition of state attorneys general, led by Eliot Spitzer, later recouped $143 million in cash and trade product from the recording industry. As ever, the record labels admitted no wrongdoing.
Staffers downloaded the software . . . Joseph Menn, All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster (New York: Crown Business, 2003), 164.
“Fuck the record industry.” As recalled by Eileen Richardson, Napster’s former CEO. When a big-name recording artist later tried to strike a deal with Napster, Richardson said that John Fanning doubled down: “Fuck her, and fuck her million bucks.” Author interview.
Pressplay . . . listicles of the “Top All-Time Tech Busts” See, for example, Dan Tynan, “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time,” PC World, May 26, 2006.
18 record companies, including Universal A&M Records was listed first because the plaintiffs were ordered alphabetically.
Morris was the best-paid man in music Sony’s Tommy Mottola was also very well compensated, but stepped down in 2003.
the average American spending over $70 a year on CDs alone RIAA figures and my calculations. Inspired by Michael Degusta’s excellent analysis of the recording industry’s historical earnings mix. See “These Charts Explain the REAL Death of the Music Industry,” Business Insider, February 18, 2011.
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Inside the company a civil war had broken out Frank Rose, “The Civil War Inside Sony,” Wired, November 2002.
“led the development of a standard means . . . called MP3” Charles C. Mann, “The Heavenly Jukebox,” Atlantic, September 2000.
“the father of the mp3” Mark Boal, “Leonardo’s Art,” Brill’s Content, August 2000.
59 million dollars SEC filings show Frankel owned 522,661 shares of AOL stock, then trading at $112.
“widespread adoption of the standard on the Internet” 2001 Fraunhofer Annual Report.
“Do not steal music” See, for example, Brandenburg’s keynote lecture, Techfest 2012, IIT Bombay, India.
Fraunhofer made their feelings known to the device manufacturers Chris “Monty” Montgomery, who led the development of the Ogg standard, later called these kinds of actions a “protection racket.” Open-source advocate Eben Moglen observed that “an accusation of infringement has no legal weight, so there is no real downside to making such a claim.” For more, see Jake Edge, “Xiph.org’s ‘Monty’ on Codecs and Patents,” Lwn.net, November 9, 2011.
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The document that outlined the methodology for encoding and distributing Scene mp3s Historical Scene releasing standards for a variety of media can currently be found at Scenerules.irc.gs.
he wasn’t interested in mind-numbing discussions about the relative merits of constant and variable bit rates But you are, aren’t you? Fraunhofer’s earliest mp3 encoding used the same number of bits per second throughout the entire encoding process—even during parts of the song that could be represented with very little information. This was constant bit rate encoding. In the late 1990s, researchers at an audio software company called Xing realized it would be better to use more bits for the most complex parts of a song and fewer for the least. This was called variable bit rate encoding, and Xing introduced an mp3 encoder with this capability. Most mp3s today use variable.
“black redneck” Facebook comment left on a picture of Glover with the Quad Squad.
charged with felony embezzlement Chaney Sims later pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property, a misdemeanor.
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“a bunch of drunken sailors nursing a hangover” Frank Pellegrini, “What AOL Time Warner’s $54 Billion Loss Means,” Time, April 25, 2002.
up to 40 gigabytes of storage The third-generation iPod, released April 2003.
“people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” Andy Reinhardt, “Steve Jobs on Apple’s Resurgence: Not a One-Man Show,” BusinessWeek, May 12, 1998.
They were “educational” Carlos Linares, the RIAA’s designated expert witness for file-sharing prosecutions, repeatedly used this term to describe the lawsuits in conversation with me.
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targeting companies like Grokster, LimeWire, and Kazaa In 2011, during its lawsuit against LimeWire, the RIAA filed a brief seeking damages of up to $75 trillion—more than the GDP of the entire world.
a deliberate, earsplitting fake Known as “spoofing,” this was a short-lived attempt by the RIAA to degrade the value of the peer-to-peer sites by filling them with bogus files.
The Pirate Bay’s founders loved controversy For more on them, see the excellent crowdfunded documentary TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard, directed by Simon Klose (Nonami, 2013), legally available as a torrent.
“. . . please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons” The response was posted to the Pirate Bay’s website in August 2004 and signed, “Polite as usual, Anakata.” Anakata is Svartholm Warg’s screen name.
University of Teesside Today known as Teesside University.
Ellis was becoming a quality snob To be specific, he insisted on mp3s with a minimum variable bit rate of 192 kbps or higher.
He permitted only mp3s ripped from the original compact discs Ellis would later open this to rips from cassette tapes, vinyl records, and Web streams.