How music got free

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth As I moved toward higher-quality files from private torrent sites, the albums took up more space than typical downloads.

a secret database that tracked thirty years of leaks Specifically, a database of Scene NFOs stretching back to 1982.

using forensic data analysis Different Scene releasing groups and torrent sites used different specifications for preferred bit rates and encoders over the years. By comparing these specifications with embedded ID3 metadata in the file, it is possible to get a general sense of an mp3’s time and place of origin.

CHAPTER 1

“He’s very good at math . . .” All quotes from Fraunhofer colleagues. The last is from Seitzer.

liminal contours of human perception For details, see Eberhard Zwicker and Richard Feldtkeller, The Ear as a Communication Receiver (Acoustical Society of America, 1999).

“Perfect Sound Forever” Philips’ tagline for its demonstration 1982 compact disc was “Pure, Perfect Sound Forever.” The disc contained tracks by Elton John, Dire Straits, and the Dutch Swing College Band.

one-twelfth their original size Digital information is stored in binary units of zero or one, and each individual value is referred to as a “bit.” The bit rate of CD audio is 1,411.2 kilobits per second (kbps)—in other words, it requires 1,411,200 of these bits to store one second of stereo sound. Germany’s first digital phone lines transmitted data at 128 kbps—in other words, they could transmit 128,000 of these bits per second. Thus the CD audio specification was 11.025 times larger than the capacity of the data pipe. With the conservative touch of the engineer, Seitzer rounded this number up.

the compression algorithm could target different output sizes Technically, Brandenburg’s algorithm made multiple passes on the source audio until the desired bit rate was achieved. With each pass the information was simplified, and fewer bits were used. A 128-kbps mp3 took more passes to create than a 256-kbps mp3, and thus its audio quality was lower.

Johnston was the Newton to Brandenburg’s Leibniz Like Newton, Johnston claimed he had got there first and, with a somewhat churlish touch, would tell of a public presentation he’d given in Toronto in 1984 in which he’d outlined concepts in perceptual coding that predated Brandenburg’s work by nearly two years. But AT&T hadn’t understood the value of Johnston’s research, and Brandenburg had filed his patent first.

MPEG . . . decides which technology makes it to the consumer marketplace MPEG is perhaps the world’s strangest standardization committee. Its continued existence depends almost entirely on the work of a single person: an eccentric Italian engineer by the name of Leonardo Chiariglione. Despite volunteering more than 10,000 hours of his life managing the organization for the last 25 years, Chiariglione lays claim to none of its patents and has never earned any money for his work. He describes his motivation in almost metaphysical terms: “MPEG is the bridge between the human and the rest of the world.”

The Stockholm contest was to be graded A technical description of the format and results of the Stockholm contest can be found in “MPEG/Audio Subjective Assessments Test Report,” International Organization for Standardization, 1990.

MPEG approached Fraunhofer with a compromise In addition to the MPEG deal, Fraunhofer made engineering concessions to please Thomson and AT&T. The final piece of technology took a variety of sound-sampling and compression methods and bound them together with the computing equivalent of masking tape. James Johnston, who despite his grumpy, plainspoken manner, was careful never to swear, thus described the mp3 as “A hybrid. Or maybe an impolite word for an illegitimate child.”

better known today as the mp3 The name “mp3” was not widely used until the introduction of Windows 95. During the period after the MPEG announcement, the mp3 was referred to as “Layer 3.” Although anachronistic, from here on I refer to it as the mp3 for clarity.

like a detour around a car crash See, for example, Karlheinz Brandenburg, “MP3 and AAC Explained,” paper presented at the AES 17th International Conference on High Quality Audio Coding, Signa, Italy, September 2–5, 1999.

voted to abandon the mp3 forever The final official decision of the European Digital Audio Broadcasting standard was filed May 1995.

CHAPTER 2

PolyGram compact disc manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina The property lot of the plant is technically in Grover, North Carolina. However, all of the former plant employees I spoke with referred to it only as the Kings Mountain plant.

first ever automobile factory outside of Germany BMW had manufactured parts outside of Germany before, but the Spartanburg plant was the first complete production line.

property values plummeted, following a predictable pattern of racial segregation Author’s impressions, confirmed by real estate website Zillow.

CHAPTER 3

company car, a personal chauffeur . . . ten million dollars Mark Landler, “The Perks of a Music Man,” New York Times, July 10, 1995.

more Bobby Darin than Bob Dylan Chuck Philips, “Universal Music Chief’s Winding Comeback Trail,” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1999. Morris’ quote reads: “Yeah. I was like a cross between Neil Sedaka and Bobby Darin. It sounds pretty wimpish now, but that’s what was happening in 1962.”

Ertegun was a legend For the classic treatment of Ertegun, see George W. S. Trow, “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse,” New Yorker, May 29 and June 5, 1978.

a bonus of a million dollars Robert Greenfield, The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 313.

long-standing ties to organized crime For more on this, see Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business (New York: Vintage, 1990).

“We’re going to make more hits.” Morris interview. He has been telling this anecdote for years. See also Greenfield, Last Sultan, 313.

his appointment was regarded with skepticism See, for example, James Bates, “Music Maven: Doug Morris Has Set the Tone for the Dinosaur-to-Diva Rise of Atlantic,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1994. Morris is described as “someone who cooled his heels for years before finally getting his chance.”

a daring corporate insurrection inside Time Warner For the full story, see Fredric Dannen, “Showdown at the Hit Factory,” New Yorker, November 21, 1994.

“Morris was like an old country lawyer.” Larry Kenswil, author interview.

all of Warner’s A&R men had passed on them From Marc Nathan, interviewed by Michael Laskow on the website of Taxi, an independent A&R company: “A&R had essentially passed on Hootie and the Blowfish, dismissing them really as just a bar band. But a research assistant . . . kept coming up with this band named Hootie and the Blowfish that was selling 50 to 100 pieces in virtually every store in the Carolinas. When the retail sheets were brought to Doug Morris, and Doug said, ‘What is this band Hootie and the Blowfish?’ A&R said, ‘Oh, it’s a bar band, and we passed on them.’ Doug essentially said, ‘Well, get someone to un-pass right away because this is the real deal.’”

“Yeah, but to us, you’re the Michael Jordan of baseball.” Fred Goodman, Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 79. Goodman has Danny Goldberg originally making the crack as a quiet aside, then Iovine repeating it aloud. He cites Iovine as a source.

Henry Luce III . . . was seen applauding Steve Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age (New York: Free Press, 2009), 61.

“I would ask the executives of Time Warner a question . . .” Bob Dole, “Dole Campaign Speech,” C-SPAN video, May 31, 1995.

a black-and-white party shot of himself, dwarfed by Suge and Snoop Morris still has this picture. It now rests on his coffee table at Sony.

CHAPTER 4

a guy named Steve Church Church passed away after a battle with brain cancer in 2012. He was 56 years old. In a tribute page on Telos’ website, he was warmly remembered by friends, family, and colleagues.

L3Enc . . . consumers would create their own mp3 files L3Enc used a DOS-based command line interface. A typical command from 1995 might read:

l3enc track_10.wav ironic.mp3 -br 128000

This tells Brandenburg’s algorithm to compress Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” to 128,000 bits per second.

12 compact discs . . . to one It didn’t have to be a CD. Brandenburg’s algorithm could handle any audio source.

Thomson SA Today known as Technicolor SA.

an engineer to jerry-rig . . . the world’s first handheld mp3 player Robert Friedrich, a Fraunhofer hardware expert, built the device.

in late 1995 . . . a spiky red starburst shouted, NEU! The earliest snapshot of this website on the Internet Archive is dated to August 1996. Grill believes that earlier pages looked similar.

please send 85 deutsche marks From the readme.txt file accompanying early versions of L3Enc.

CHAPTER 5

Hughes Network Systems Today known as Hughes Communications.

a cluttered blue-on-white color scheme This description is based on the Internet Archive’s earliest Yahoo! snapshot, from October 17, 1996.

“AFT: Please tell us about this new concept in releasing . . .” These quotes are copied verbatim from Affinity #3, “Spot Light.” “NetFraCk” is interviewed by “Mr. Mister” and the interview is dated August 19, 1996. The executable file may be retrieved from Textfiles.com, but you will need a DOS emulator to view it. My thanks to Johnny Ryan at University College Dublin for the original pointer.

CHAPTER 6

the so-called “Rothschilds of the New World” This formulation comes from Peter C. Newman’s The Bronfman Dynasty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978).

Bronfman had pushed for reorganization For details, see Connie Bruck, “Bronfman’s Big Deals,” New Yorker, May 11, 1998.

Time Warner had countersued Goodman, Fortune’s Fool, 81. Time Warner and Morris eventually agreed to a confidential settlement, and the countersuit was dropped.

The initial credit line Junior offered . . . was only $100 million Ibid., 81.

Bronfman promoted Morris to run all of MCA Morris replaced Al Teller, who resigned due to “philosophical differences.” That same day, Michael Fuchs, the man who had fired Morris at Warner, was coincidentally also let go. Including Ertegun at Atlantic and Robert Morgado at Warner, Morris had now outlasted his four previous bosses. For details, see Chuck Philips, “Company Town: Music Industry Shake-Up,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1995.

a New Orleans rap conglomerate by the name of Cash Money Records Morris’ A&R team, consisting of Jocelyn Cooper, Marc Nathan, and Dino Delvaille, first brought Cash Money to his attention. For details, see Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New York: Penguin, 2011), 574.

a trancelike state of total concentration My impressions of watching Morris preview a new artist in his offices at Sony.

a piñata for the press The exact quote regarding Bronfman, from an anonymous entertainment executive, is, “He’s like a piñata! Hit him and money comes out.” Bruck, “Bronfman’s Big Deals,” 77.

the term “pirate” was more than 300 years old In 1709, writing for The Tatler, the British columnist Joseph Addison complained of “a set of wretches we Authors call Pirates, who print any book, poem or sermon as soon as it appears in the world, in a smaller volume; and sell it, as all other thieves do stolen goods, at a cheaper rate.”

CHAPTER 7

a bundled package The simultaneous distribution of L3Enc and WinPlay3 was a boon to early adoption. By contrast, a 14-year gap separated the debut of the home CD player and the home CD burner.

direct links to Fraunhofer’s FTP server See, for example, Digital Audio Crew’s first Scene mp3 releasing tutorial, dated August 30, 1996.

The RIAA would later offer various explanations Specifically Hilary Rosen, corroborated by Kenswil, Brandenburg, and Grill.

transparency . . . achieve it in 99 percent of all cases Even today, certain cherry-picked samples can cause the mp3’s psychoacoustic encoder problems. Castanets are particularly difficult.

Neil Young . . . a losing battle to preserve audio quality Young by his own admission is half deaf from decades of guitar feedback. He is on a quixotic mission here.

twenty different patents . . . two dozen inventors Information on mp3 patents comes from MP3licensing.com, interviews with Brandenburg and Linde, the European Patent Office, and my own tabulations.

Frankel did not bother to license the technology Nullsoft would eventually become a Fraunhofer licensee, but not until after the popularity of the Winamp player was well established, and only under threat of litigation.

in the Constitution, no less The exact text grants Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).

CHAPTER 8

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.

CHAPTER 10

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.

CHAPTER 11

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.

CHAPTER 12

“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.

CHAPTER 13

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.

CHAPTER 14

the distinction of leaking the remix to “Ignition” Kelly himself had leaked the first verse of the song weeks earlier, breaking off listeners with a little preview to the remix. He did not usually do this.

Now 18 APC members were facing felony-level conspiracy charges Seventeen of them reached plea bargain deals. The lone holdout, Barry Gitarts, was found guilty at trial and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

“. . . We are not here to line the pockets of bootleggers” From the NFO for EGO’s 2002 leak of the Dixie Chicks’ Home.

CHAPTER 15

Warner . . . had been taken over by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. For a book-length treatment, see Goodman’s Fortune’s Fool.

a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company EDC was eventually acquired by Glenayre Technologies, a wireless messaging firm. Glenayre would then take the EDC name.

Morris . . . now publicly vented against Apple See Billboard, “Red Hot Chili Peppers, QOTSA, T.I. Rock for Zune,” November 11, 2006. His exact words were: “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, so it’s time to get paid for it.” The remarks came as Morris was himself trying to get into the mp3 player market. In exchange for providing licenses to sell its music, Morris negotiated for Microsoft to pay Universal a percentage for every Zune it sold. Since the Zune tanked, this amounted to almost no money, but a similar deal with Apple would have made him a fortune.

his critics in the digital era Chief among these was Bob Lefsetz, author of the Lefsetz Letter, a widely followed industry blog. Morris referred to him as a “chirping bird.”

“Females 18–24, all Black” Email sent July 11, 2003, requesting the campaign, submitted as evidence by the New York State Attorney General’s Office. The cost of this fakery was $1,750.

“we are hiring a request company . . . to jack TRL for Lindsay” Email sent June 18, 2005, submitted as evidence by the New York State Attorney General’s Office. The names of the sender and recipient of the email are redacted.

selling songs that even their creators acknowledged were not very good The situation was especially bad for established acts. Joe Walsh, formerly the guitarist of the Eagles, recalled the pressure from the suits for a follow-up to the band’s top-selling Greatest Hits album: “The record company didn’t care if we farted and burped. It was all: when can we have it? They would put that out, because that was their whole corporate quarter.” History of the Eagles, directed by Alison Ellwood (Jigsaw Productions, 2013).

Wayne got weird For more on this period in Wayne’s life, see The Carter, directed by Adam Bhala Lough (QD3 Entertainment, 2009).

“The mixtapes were obviously very concerning to us as a label . . .” Knopper, Appetite, 247.

What if . . . the FBI started leaking albums themselves? The idea is floated in Patrick Saunders’ FBI case file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The idea is killed by the Computer Crimes section’s senior counsel, citing experience with industry contacts. It is unclear from the heavily redacted file if the FBI had ever done this before.

CHAPTER 16

Pink Moon had sold more copies than . . . in the previous quarter century See “Rock Star Back from the Dead,” Birmingham Post (UK), April 7, 2000.

an alphabet soup of file types—FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec, an open-source standard from the same group that developed Ogg. Because it does not use psychoacoustic methods, it achieves compression rates of only 60–70 percent. However, as it is a lossless encoder, the original audio can be reconstructed from the compressed file.

“the world’s greatest record store” Ben Westhoff, “Trent Reznor and Saul Williams Discuss Their New Collaboration, Mourn OiNK,” Vulture, October 30, 2007. Reznor went on to explain that he remained a patron of the arts, and had paid Radiohead $5,000 for his copy of In Rainbows.

He used the music-tracking site Last.fm Ellis’ Last.fm account has since been deleted.

“second enclosure of the commons” James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain” (Creative Commons, 2003).

“The TUBE BAR prank calls . . .” Email submitted as trial evidence.

“there was nothing left to upload” Similar complaints may be found today on What.cd.

CHAPTER 17

The beef had made the cover of Rolling Stone Evan Serpick, “Kanye vs. 50 Cent,” Rolling Stone, September 6, 2007.

a coworker pulled him aside Jerry Swink, a maintenance worker at the plant.

CHAPTER 18

only one . . . had been brought to a jury trial Several other defendants would later take their cases to trial. They all lost.

Thomas appealed the ruling The case of Virgin Records America, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset is endless. The judge in the first trial vacated the first ruling of $222,000 in damages and ordered a retrial. Thomas was found guilty again at the second trial, and the jury ordered her to pay an astonishing $1.92 million for pirating 24 songs. The same judge called this amount “monstrous and shocking” and reduced damages to $54,000. Thomas refused to pay, and appealed. A third trial was held to determine damages. The jury in that trial ordered Thomas to pay $1.5 million. The amount was again reduced to $54,000, which Thomas again refused to pay. She appealed to a higher court, which then reinstated the original damages from the first trial of $222,000. Thomas then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which rejected her petition.

the music industry’s sacrificial martyr See Nick Pinto, “Jammie Thomas-Rasset: The Download Martyr,” Minneapolis City Pages, February 16,

2011.

“There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist . . .” Seth Mnookin, “Universal’s CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He’s Giving Songs Away,” Wired, November 2007.

“World’s Stupidest Recording Executive” This was later softened to “Is Universal’s Doug Morris the Stupidest Recording Exec Ever?,” Mary Jane Irwin, Gawker, November 27, 2007.

Jackson . . . rights to the majority of the Beatles catalog For a longer discussion, see Stephen Gandel, “Michael Jackson’s Estate: Saved by the Beatles,” Time, July 1, 2009.

over the remaining million dollars, they would flip a coin Carter offers his own take on this event in the lyrics to the song “Run This Town.”

CHAPTER 19

What.cd’s music archive grew to surpass even Oink at its peak It also became a trophy case for the holy grails of online piracy. J. D. Salinger’s leaked “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” was first posted there, as were high-resolution full-color scans of all 2,438 pages of Nathan Myrvhold’s 52-pound cookbook, Modernist Cuisine.

“A place called Linux?” Trial transcript. Alan Ellis and Matthew Wyatt proceedings, January 13, 2010.

He later served a two-year sentence Svartholm Warg’s legal troubles are ongoing. Unrelated to his work with the Pirate Bay, he faces criminal charges in both Sweden and Denmark for hacking into government and commercial databases. He was found guilty at trial in Denmark in October 2014 and sentenced to three years in prison.

“It is impossible to enforce the ban against non-commercial file sharing . . .” Christian Engström and Rick Falkvinge, The Case for Copyright Reform (Creative Commons, 2012), 1.

two Pirates would take seats at the table of the European Union Neither would win reelection. Currently there is one Pirate in the EU parliament: Julia Reda, representing Germany.

their original 14-year terms The U.S. Copyright Act of 1790 provided 14 years of protection, with the option to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if the author was still alive. It was patterned after the similar UK Statute of Anne, passed in 1710.

protections that could last for hundreds of years The relevant piece of U.S. legislation is 1998’s Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Sonny Bono Act, after its author, or the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, after its primary beneficiary. The legislation extended the terms of copyright to seventy years after the death of the creator and offered even greater protections for works of corporate authorship. It passed with broad bipartisan support.

“Negative rates are a function of global abundance . . .” Izabella Kaminska, “Counterintuitive Insights That Are Only Now Making the Mainstream Now [sic],” FT Alphaville, April 26, 2013.

only in one other country . . . did the Pirates gain a foothold In 2013, the Pirates won three seats in Iceland’s national parliament. In 2014, a Pirate was elected the mayor of a small town in the Czech Republic.

CHAPTER 20

The contact’s name was listed only as “D” Glover’s IP address was also stored in the phone.

Chow had his own lawyers . . . George Murphy and Terry Yates Murphy would later call this his favorite case of all time. “It was an ass-kicking from the first minute.”

He performed poorly Specifically, Glover claimed to have spoken briefly with Cassim at their pretrial arraignment in Virginia. Rivera challenged this assertion, claiming that he had been standing next to Cassim the entire time and that no such conversation had occurred.

the FBI did not present recordings of Cassim’s voice as evidence It is unclear if such recordings existed. Glover’s lawyer later told him that the FBI had wiretapped Glover’s cell phone, but the Department of Justice made no mention of this during the trial.

EPILOGUE

“near-military-scale planning” Steven J. Horowitz, “Protecting the Throne,” Billboard, August 20, 2011.

Patrick Saunders . . . eventually got a job as a paralegal He also paid a service called DeleteMe to remove all trace of himself from the Internet. I found him through a database used by skip tracers.

Simon Tai . . . was never charged with a crime Having married a pastor’s daughter and converted to Christianity, Tai credited divine intervention.

soon found myself in a warehouse in Queens Specifically Guardian Data Destruction in Long Island City. I give them my highest recommendation.