Original subtitles

♪ MTV ♪

When Napster first came about, like,

I didn't understand the Internet yet.

I thought Yahoo was a person.

The music biz is spiraling, y'all.

They never saw the Internet coming.

This is completely illegal.

Like, completely [...] illegal.

A small group of digital pirates

have leaked hundreds of millions of dollars

worth of copyrighted material to places like Napster.

What do we do?

[...].

The industry tried to fight back.

We sued them.

But, of course, that only made it more popular.

Meanwhile in Shelby, North Carolina...

ADEG was--he was a star.

Without him, none of this would have happened.

A lone pirate was just getting started.

[tense droning music]

[dial-up tone beeping]

♪ ♪

It spans the globe like a superhighway.

It is called Internet.

Audio computer files, MP3, dropped a bomb

on the multibillion-dollar recording industry.

There's no reason that you have to pick up a CD

in order to buy music.

Pirates go for the hits.

Willfully violated thousands of copyrights.

The goal of the pirates wasn't about money.

It's not okay.

I talk to kids. They can't believe it.

And does the punishment fit the crime?

$222,000.

Something's got to be done.

Will irreparably harm the music industry.

Should you be compensated for your work or not?

A lot of things are possible.

It doesn't make it right.

That's ultimately where the future should be going.

A whole generation got used to the idea that--

all: Music should be free.

[dramatic electronic music]

♪ ♪

When I met Kali,

I asked him what was the benefits

of me being a member of the group, RNS.

And that's when I was introduced to FTPs.

All these different servers around the world

called topsites--

it looks like--basically just like folders

with a name and a title, telling you,

you know, what was inside the folder.

There were things called topsites,

which were these enormous

secret data repositories online

which probably only at any given time

a couple hundred people in the world had access to.

The access that I got once I was in APC was crazy.

These sites had, like,

multiple terabytes

of data on them.

I had access to the RNS topsites,

where I was able to download things

for my own personal use.

My friends in real life-- I would be the source for them

if they wanted to hear a certain song,

but they didn't know that I was part

of this secretive group

on this, you know, chat channel.

If you wanted it,

it was right there at your fingertips--

you know, PlayStation games, movies.

I was like, "Wow.

I can make a lot of money with this material."

[dial-up tone]

[relaxing music]

♪ ♪

The only rules Kali had in the group was,

we weren't supposed to sell, like, any of the material

that came off the FTP sites.

Our philosophy really was, as long as we weren't making

any money off of what we were doing,

morally and legally, like, that was what allowed us

to go to sleep at night.

I wasn't listening.

I saw a way to make money.

Here in Shelby,

there's not a lot of high-paying jobs.

To me, the plant wasn't enough.

I had a child at the time when I first started.

I wanted to set, like, a trust fund up

so he would have money

and I could send him to college

and he could pretty much have everything he needed in life

Dell--what he started to do was get

these first-run leaked movies and burn them.

he would go to the barbershops,

give the barber this massive spindle of bootleg DVDs,

and then the barber would sell those to his clients.

1 movie for 5, 3 for 10,

7 for 20.

What was your biggest seller?

I'm trying to think of all the good movies.

Like "Passion of the Christ," must be.

Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, that definitely did good.

Before you know it, your shop was running with people.

Everybody want movies and music more so than haircuts.

♪ Just one step ahead is a step too far... ♪

Ever since the textile mills shut down,

life in Shelby had been hard.

The CD plant offered a ray of hope,

but the fact remained that most of Shelby's people

were living in poverty.

As a member of RNS, Dell saw an opportunity to give

a little something back to the community.

Pretty much everything that I know with a computer

comes from this gentleman right here.

Carmey was one of my high-school friends.

He got out of prison for selling drugs.

He had no job, couldn't find a job

'cause he was a convicted felon.

So I sit him down one day at the computer,

and I showed him how to burn material.

Coming from where I was coming from,

working at the Waffle House,

things was not that green, so I need a little help.

And that was a lot of help.

I would make $200, $300 a day,

and it was something to where I could do a lot with my kids.

I was always there at every event

for my girls, basketball games for my son.

Most of my customers that couldn't afford cable

couldn't afford going to the rental store

and getting movies.

Netflix makes millions of dollars

taking a copywritten movie and making it available for me.

Yeah, we was Netflix before Netflix.

It was the bootleggers.

Glover saw a way to build an empire,

an empire of piracy.

He realized that if he could get the CDs

out of the plant consistently,

he would get access to these kind of elite topsites.

I had access, but in return, we had to load these sites

with unreleased material.

I was an off-loader. That's what they called it.

My duty was to check the CDs, make sure there's no smudges,

no cracks in the jewel boxes.

You put a certain amount on each cart or each pallet

based on the paperwork, you know,

and how much supposed to go on there.

Rodney ran-- real hard worker.

Worked there for years, never got hired permanent.

He was pretty much one of the best smugglers

inside the plant.

Dell saw a way to get paid, as he should.

The only catch was, he had to keep the leaks coming.

Next thing you know, in the break room,

we sitting there talking, we eating.

Dell--he happened to come by the table,

and he was like, "Oh, okay. Y'all eating good.

Y'all ain't eating what the canteen"--

You know, 'cause Kim was cooking,

and we was bringing our meals and stuff.

He's like, "You got some more of that?"

He said, "I'll stop by after work and get a plate."

And then when he came by,

that's when all the stuff was discussed and everything.

- Mm-hmm. Like a manager. - Dell was like a manager.

He had an office. - Everything.

He went to the meetings.

He had all the intel. - All the intel.

It's like, just the one person.

Kali would always know what was coming to the plant

before we would even know.

He just came up to me one time.

He was like, "You know they running

such-and-such a so-and-so over on line whatchamacallit."

I was like, "Oh." And then he'd just walk off.

He the damn manager. I'm like, what the [...]?

So it made it easier.

Every week, Kim would have a menu.

Kim--she worked in hand packing.

She was known for, like, selling food.

I'm charging them, like, $10 to $12 a plate,

But it's worth it.

They were all paying for it. - Dollar extra for dessert.

Yeah. So we had to deliver the trays to the plant.

So that meant he had to come out and get them.

- And they'd help me get them. - Yeah.

So, while they helping him get the trays,

they don't know they helping him bring me CDs.

They smuggled them out in food trays.

They noticed food trays was never checked.

And the big metal belt buckles--

a lot of guys would package the CDs in a latex glove,

and they would stick them behind the metal belt buckle,

because when the guard hit you with the magical wand,

he would not make you pull off your belt.

I remember when that Jay-Z "Black Album" hit.

You know what?

I can get me some of that money.

I'm going to get this whole damn spindle.

And he did.

I had never saw anybody get a whole spindle of discs

outside the plant.

I mean, I ain't stopping their money.

And that's the way I was looking at it.

Gold out, Versace, brand-new teetheses.

How you doing? This is Master P.

And welcome to my crib. You heard me?

These are my racing cars.

This is a Impala SS.

Man, please. I can't get $10?

That's the way I'm looking at it.

So I didn't feel bad.

It's like a child in a candy store.

You cannot put a child in a store full of candy

and expect them not to touch it.

And that's the way it was down there.

You saw it, you know it's that major--

it's that bum, bum, bum,

and you got to have it.

I didn't know it was gonna turn into

what the hell it turned into.

People in the music industry start losing they damn mind.

[dial-up tone]

All of a sudden, you wake up one day

and two things are happening at the same time.

One is, technology...

is moving 100 miles an hour in our face.

The second thing was,

you had what was happening with the leaks.

We went very quickly from albums selling

two million in their first week

or hundreds of thousands their first week

to, within a year or two,

those numbers had come down so much.

You couldn't be in the top 50

with 40,000 your first week,

and 5 years later,

you could have the number-3 album with 40,000.

If you sell 50,000 your first week

because of leaks or whatever the [...] happened,

you're going to sell 15,000 the next week.

We heard that "The Black Album"

had leaked out.

They at it again. They getting better.

[laughs]

A majority of the world has heard your music,

but your record sales-- they don't reflect that.

Kids--they want the music,

and they don't want you to tell them how to listen to it,

where and when.

A whole generation got used to the idea

that music should be free.

Marshall was very hesitant

to ever let his music leave the studio

that was unreleased.

We had to send music,

and I wasn't going to send it over the Internet.

So I was mailing shit to Paul so he could hear it.

When he had new music that he wanted me to check out,

he would send a physical CD to me.

He was worried that people would know that

it was Eminem sending a CD to Paul Rosenberg,

so they would try to disguise what they were sending.

And I put it in a big box,

and it'd be wrapped ten different times,

and there'd be one CD.

Cans of sodas, you know,

a magazine, and a basketball.

Or put it in a tampon box, send it to Paul.

Who's going to look in the tampon box?

So I'd come to the office or my house

and see this big box and be like, what's that?

And then I'd look at where it came from,

and I was like, "Oh, that's the CD that Marshall was

going to send me."

Stress traum--

post-traumatic--what? - PTLD.

Post-traumatic leak disorder.

Post-traumatic leak disorder is what I had.

The artists did not know

anything about the distribution plan.

They thought it was the engineers.

They thought in the recording studio,

the engineer that was recording you

was selling the leaks.

The first time leaking was an issue for me is

when a Jay-Z song got leaked.

Kid named Will. He's a DJ.

He just stays on the Internet all the time.

And I told him, "Just bring me over a copy."

So, when Will brought a copy, his face was like--

"Yeah, it's real, man."

What's really happening--

we're blaming our friends and people around us

and start trying to keep this sealed,

and it's like, there's nothing you can do

once it's on to that machine,

'cause you can't beat the computer.

You can't.

We would send locked briefcases, et cetera,

to the mastering room.

No one would have the tape.

We'd master it, take everything with us.

We did everything we could.

Jimmy said, "Imagine if a person cut

"on a faucet and Coca-Cola came out.

"What would you do?

Because that's what's happening in our industry."

It was sad to see, like, the big stores

that used to hold CDs not be there anymore.

Virgin Records went under with us on air

You saw a lot of folks become expendable,

primarily in the hip-hop space,

because hip-hop as a business

wasn't bringing in any income.

More bad news for the record industry this week.

CD sales are down 20% this year.

We're looking at the numbers, and Jimmy says,

we played baseball for so long

and now we're sitting in the park.

You go to swing for a home run,

but instead of it being a baseball,

it's a wiffle ball.

It's not gonna go out of the park anymore.

Albums were being decimated. People were getting free--

And by the way, I had four teenagers.

If my kids are getting music for free,

everybody's getting it for free.

So this is, "Houston, we've got a problem."

I knew we had to race

to legitimate digital distribution,

and I don't believe the industry raced hard enough.

The mentality of labels is, they play goalie.

They're playing defense constantly,

especially in technology.

I remember Jimmy walking in and saying,

we got to flip this.

We got to attack the problem.

How are we going to use technology

as a weapon to the future

instead of defense in the past?

How are we going to save the business, one,

but, two, how are we going to embrace the future?

That's when conversations started in earnest

with Steve Jobs.

He was really nice but really aggressive with me on the phone

in our first conversation, where he said,

basically, "I love music.

"Of course I don't want anyone to steal it.

"I think people should buy music,

and you guys are idiots."

There it is, right there. [applause]

So he built a device to make music portable.

I bought in hook, line, and sinker

to the idea, to them as individuals,

to Apple as a company.

I was all in Apple.

I know that's when Jimmy became Jimmy Iovine.

Like, he was Jimmy Iovine.

But once you go into the goddamn Yoda house--

I call Steve Jobs Yoda. Come on, now.

I remember calling Steve and saying,

"You don't have an urban market.

Hip-hop kids are not buying this device."

I said, "Steve,

there's a song by this hip-hop artist 50 Cent."

♪ I don't know what you heard about me ♪

If you give me 150 grand

to make this video better...

♪ But you can't get a dollar out of me ♪

I can put this in the video,

and it'll get the iPod in the urban market.

He said, "Great."

I met Steve Jobs for the first time in Jimmy's office.

He had an iPod, you know.

I was like, "How many songs you said it hold?"

Jimmy goes, "You see that? You see that?

"Strange enough, Steve, this kid is golden.

They're gonna buy it if he says it."

♪ No Cadillac, no perms, you can't see ♪

♪ That I'm a [...] P-I-M-P ♪

It's gone.

[tense music]

Nobody benefited more from MP3 piracy

than Apple did.

Are you going to go spend $100,000 to fill up your iPod

with legally downloaded songs?

No, you are not.

Steve Jobs used to put on the box,

"don't steal music,"

when of course that's what people were buying it for.

Even though Apple made billions

slinging iPods full of pirated music,

the labels never came for them.

Instead, they went to war with their own fans

internally, they called this plan "Project Hubcap."

The music industry made it loud and clear today

to what it calls "pirates,"

who illegally share music with others on the Internet,

the message, "stop, or we'll sue."

Their reaction

was very Boomer-ish.

Like, I'm suing him.

I'm suing Carl over in Detroit.

That was a PR nightmare.

Suing anybody-- I didn't care about all that.

I only cared about, there has to be an idea here.

That's why when I met Steve at Apple,

I said, oh, here's an idea.

If we make it great and it works,

the rest will take care of itself.

Kids were getting these threatening subpoenas

in the mail, saying,

give us $3,000, or we'll take you to court.

So it was basically a shakedown.

It was a moment where the music industry was flailing,

trying to figure out what its next move was going to be.

That was a tyrannical show of force and power.

In high school, I would download stuff

on LimeWire, KaZaA.

My friends would come over, and we'd burn CDs.

And you would just click and download it,

and it would appear in your shared folder.

So it was like Nirvana, "Come as You Are,"

Limp Bizkit, "Leech,"

Green Day, "Nice Guys Finish Last,"

Beck, "Loser."

and the fact that they automatically shared by default

became the basis for the lawsuit against me.

A college student who admitted downloading

and sharing music with his friends

just got hit with a staggering verdict of $675,000,

which breaks down to an astonishing $22,500 per song.

Where are you going to get the money?

Well, I don't have the money for that.

I don't have the money

for even any appreciable fraction of that.

I really have no choice at this point

but to declare bankruptcy.

Ultimately, they sued about 17,000 people in this way,

all just average individuals.

Once corporations start suing their consumers,

their customers, they're really on a slippery slope.

You know, blaming the record sales on the piracy thing--

it's so obviously bull[...].

The only people that are scared

are people in the record industry that

are used to things going the old way

and they're always scared of new change.

It's so obviously down to the fact that nobody wants

to buy the records they're making.

It's making the more business side of the music industry

look like ostriches with their heads in the sand.

I think people are too concerned with, like--

it's going to kill the record industry 'cause we're not

gonna be able to make every penny.

How much money do you think they spent

prosecuting me, persecuting me

with this big legal team of theirs?

Oh, I'm sure six figures.

I'm sure well in excess of a million dollars.

I'm like, ha!

Suck on that. Eat your own poison.

You didn't get shit out of me, RIAA.

We would be suing individuals who we knew

were actually our biggest fans.

And we had done surveys that showed that people

who downloaded the most actually bought the most.

That seemed like kind of a dumb strategy,

to take on those people.

The record companies never gave a damn

about the artists anyway.

Four major corporations-- four of them--

and Hillary's fighting to protect them.

Ms. Rosen, isn't this strictly

about your profits and your money?

I just felt like it was a lose-lose at the time,

and I left RIAA

in June of 2003.

The music industry was facing an enormous problem,

and there was no easy way out.

[pensive music]

♪ ♪

Is there anybody in this room that honestly believes

that peer-to-peer will go away?

The RIAA and the MPAA--

they've always sought to control,

and maybe this is the one technology

they feel they can't.

P2P, to me, means power to the people.

And let's get this to a balance.

And that's all we're talking about.

Thank you, Mr. D.

The music industry and Congress--

they didn't have an established relationship.

They were enemies.

I once got called up to Senator John McCain's office,

but I brought Sean Combs and Russell Simmons

to the meeting with me.

And he says, "My kids are so excited

"that I'm meeting with you guys today,

but I think you're filth."

When it became time for the music industry

to appeal to Congress to enforce

these copyright protections,

the federal government

just straight up did not like them.

You should be embarrassed to distribute the music you do,

and you want our help?

And so they weren't feeling

especially inclined

to enforce code actions

for copyright infringement.

The majority of artists, the majority,

want to be compensated for what they do.

We need protection.

And so the industry was

really just left out to dry.

I'm not against the Internet.

I just wish that these things could be done,

music could be downloaded legitimately.

- Thank you, Mr. Cool J. - Thank you.

Politicians tend to fantasize a little bit

about how they saw this technology

evolving and coming.

We didn't.

There was a recognition immediately--

this is copyright infringement, everyone understood that.

Where people began to go their separate ways was in

their answer to the question, "What do you do about it?"

The RIAA embarked on a campaign

to get the message out years ago,

but we found that P2P activity continued,

so we took the next step-- enforcement.

RIAA led with the idea, we're doing this

to drive education, to make people aware.

It's been painful, and it's been difficult.

It was a last resort,

but it is building awareness rapidly.

It wasn't disingenuous, but it was a little cute to say,

you know, "We don't really want to sue college kids,

"but we think this is the only way to make them aware

what they're doing is illegal, that it has consequences."

Try as you may, you can't sue them all.

We could probably find some lawyers that

would be more than willing to try to sue them all,

but I don't think that's realistic.

It was a bad look.

And, I mean, I said as much,

both in public and in private to the RIAA.

And in many ways, it was probably a worse use

of resources to get the FBI involved.

[pensive music]

My name is Peter Vu.

I was a special agent for the FBI from 1996 to 2018.

I think it was approximately in 2005

when I was assigned the music case.

The FBI had a big anti-piracy contingent.

They loved to go after bootleggers.

But when the MP3 pirates came along,

these digital gangs were very sophisticated.

Even though they were all teenagers,

they had sophisticated counterintelligence methods.

It was all encrypted.

The Cyber Division was created in 2002,

shortly after 9/11,

and the whole focus of that was to address cybercrime,

which was becoming exponential at that point in time.

This was deep underground-- the warez scene.

And they knew that the FBI

were out there looking for them.

And so they started to develop a code or ethos

of being totally anonymous online

and being very careful

about who was let into the chat rooms.

Some of the terrorist groups--

you can eliminate one of them,

and then another one pops up over here

and another one over here.

It was the same way with the warez groups.

You could identify and maybe take down one of them,

and then there was another one.

It was very easy on the Web

for them to organize and do their criminal activities

without being identified.

It was hard for the FBI to bust these guys,

but what they figured they could do

was bust some of the lesser gangs

who didn't operate quite as tight an operation,

and then maybe through them,

they could flip somebody and get inside.

So they busted a smaller group called

the Apocalypse Production Crew, APC.

Like, you know it's taboo,

or you know that it's frowned upon,

but, like, you're not sitting there going,

okay, someone's going to kick my door down

'cause I just--you know, I just downloaded Tupac.

2 weeks after my 21st birthday,

14 or 17 FBI agents surrounded our apartment complex.

[rock music]

What was I gonna do, throw CDs at them?

I was laying in bed.

I essentially got woken up out of bed at gunpoint.

You know, then they basically just interviewed me

in my living room while they just, like,

collected my computer and stuff like that.

They interrogated us. They have all of the data.

So you're going to ask me, like,

oh, do you know these people?

You have actual logs that show you that I do.

I brought up, you know,

shouldn't this be done with an attorney?

The one agent--he said,

"Well, you don't need an attorney to tell the truth."

So we end up going in this room,

and we go through a bunch of information.

He asked me a lot of questions,

and we ended up going into his office.

And then I looked at the board,

and it was the entire RNS structure.

He's like, can you fill any gaps?

At that point, 100% I knew what this was about.

We were all collateral damage.

They literally didn't give a shit

about anything that we were doing,

and all they wanted were the people that were on the board.

We're talking, like, federal prison,

not, like, jail.

We're talking actual prison that you're going to go to

because of the raw amount

of data that you had on your computer.

You're this kid. The government's after you.

You have nobody on your side.

I didn't know what the hell I was going to do.

Rabid Neurosis-- they seemed to have access

to the best material

and at the earliest time.

They had something inside that group

that was able to get the material earlier.

So that was the job of the team--

of me in particular-- is to go find that leak

The press almost relished covering this.

The stories that were,

you know, glorifying the leakers

and talking about how the labels are going down.

My biggest memory of something like that would be

the article that came out in "Rolling Stone."

It literally listed the artists and the albums

that RNS had ripped.

That was what kind of publicized RNS

to the public, in a sense, because we were very private.

Napster in the press and in the media

and the public relations try and make this

an issue between Metallica and our fans,

and this is not about Metallica and its fans.

This is not about Metallica's fans.

We have a wonderful relationship with most of them

Our goal was never to put artists, you know,

in the street.

If anything, we were superfans.

Granted, we showed our affection in some strange ways,

but, you know, it was really, you know, an homage.

Like, we wanted to hear it so bad--

like, bad enough to teach ourselves

programming languages and obscure encoding strategies.

But, you know, as time progressed,

I guess the paranoia started setting in.

I think we have to kind of spin down

some of this really flagrant advertising

of what we're doing

in preference for more discreet methods.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

We were aware the leak

was generally coming from the plant,

but we didn't know exactly how or who.

The goal then was identify and locate Kali,

the leader of the group.

In the middle of the investigation,

the group shut down--

what we call a cold case.

The group has disbanded. They had moved on.

What are we going to do?

2007 was when RNS closed down.

The whole scene just kind of went on pause,

really the MP3 scene,

because we didn't know who was impacted,

who was caught, who wasn't caught,

who was a Fed, who wasn't a Fed.

Kali made the made the final decision--

we're shutting down RNS at a certain date.

This is our last release,

and we're all going to go our separate ways.

He had heard about other groups getting busted,

so I think he just wanted to be safe.

I had leaked so much material

they told me that I really didn't have

to leak any more material,

and I would still keep all my sites.

From 1996 to 2007,

RNS leaked over 40,000 songs.

Dell's identity still remained a secret,

known only to Kali.

[computer whirrs off]

[suspenseful music]

[dial-up tone]

We had an individual who was able

to make contact with Patrick Saunders,

also known as DALIVE.

He was a member of RNS.

Out of the blue, ADEG contacted Patrick

and want to get back into the scene.

Patrick introduced him

to an individual called Rick1.

DALIVEONE came to me and said

RNS's star ripper had no one--

no one to rip for anymore,

and he started shooting me releases.

He was giving me some legit stuff.

I don't know what he was doing on the side,

but at the time,

I think he just wanted different content,

the archives that he had access to,

archives in terms of, you know,

the older games, movies, and music.

Now, at that point, by now. ADEG was a high-level source,

someone who had access to pre-release material.

That was an opportunity now

for us to look into that further

and hopefully identify his real identity.

Yeah, going back in--

that's where I think I messed up,

when I released the Kanye and the 50 Cent.

♪ Don't stop, I ain't got to move ♪

♪ I can sit and watch, in the fantasy ♪

♪ It's plain to see just how it be ♪

♪ Her and me ♪

♪ Backstrokin', sweat soakin' ♪

Saying that something is number one

and being able to market that is how you get press,

how you continue the momentum.

So, when your first-week sales are being hampered

by some foreign object called piracy,

then you lose the opportunity

to get that story out.

One of those stories that was threatened

that I believe really defines this

was the battle between 50 Cent and Kanye West

on who sold more records.

It became like the Super Bowl hip-hop event.

And, of course, BET and "106 & Park"

was going to get behind it.

Clash of the titans, baby! It's finally today.

[cheers and applause]

You're talking

about two music monster mogul celebrities

Kanye West-- backpacker, college dropout.

50 Cent-- he got shot several times,

he's hood as [...], and the girls like him

'cause he is sexual chocolate.

And them coming together-- it was just electrifying.

Because the sales increased so big in the early 2000s,

it became a numbers game.

Like, the record company looks at numbers and projections.

And if it shows it has a lot of legs,

then you're going to get maybe one more single

or one more extension of your project.

Oh, this is Kanye West.

Kanye, what's up? I was just talking to them.

Yeah, yeah, I was telling them about how you're going to lose.

But 50 magnified that.

50 would say, I'm better, and my SoundScan is this,

and your SoundScan is that.

Expectations were high.

He hasn't sold a fraction of the material I sold.

We out here. Y'all know that.

Y'all don't need me to tell you that.

People who aren't even rap fans

talking about the supposed battle between you and Kanye.

Yeah, I mean, it's exciting, man.

We made it an event.

From the record company's perspective,

they're looking, and they're going, this is great.

Like, you know people are buying two and three CDs

because that's their favorite artist.

It was pretty genius

that they decided to do

this whole, you know, battle

of who puts out, you know--

who's gonna sell the most.

And what I didn't know was that the leakers

were having a field day with this.

[pensive music]

Kali and Glover are not able to control themselves.

Even though they've sworn off leaking,

they just have to keep going.

Sure enough,

two or three months later,

they decide to start again.

There was this competition between 50 Cent and Kanye West

over who was going to sell more albums.

In fact, it was Glover who decided

the outcome of this competition.

♪ ♪

Promised one to Kali,

and I promised the other one to the leader of OSC.

♪ ♪

I recall Kali telling me

that he's gonna try to get me Kanye.

One of the things that he didn't know

was that I already had Kanye,

so I had tagged it, had it ready to go,

and I think I had the better of the two releases anyway.

This decimated their sales

and destroyed this little competition

that they were having with each other

because this factory worker in North Carolina decided

that he was going to win the competition.

Why the numbers look like that?

What the [...] just happened, bro?

As record stores continued to close,

the FBI circled in on RNS.

And soon after Dell leaked the 50 Cent and Kanye albums,

the FBI arrived in Shelby, North Carolina.

We were looking at some of the leaking,

when some of these things were taking place.

And investigation led us to the fact

that it needed to be somebody on the inside--

but I say "the inside" that had access to the music industry.

And Dell Glover worked in a CD-manufacturing plant.

We had got enough evidence, now we want to execute

a search warrant for Dell Glover's house.

I had a maintenance man come up to me

inside the plant, and he was like,

look like some officers standing around your truck,

You know, look out when you go out there.

As I proceeded to my truck and I hit the unlock button,

I had three sheriffs approach me.

From their instructions, they were just told

that they had to follow me back to my house.

Got home, I saw all the agents,

saw how they had entered my house

and was hauling out my DVD duplicators that I had built,

anything electronic.

♪ ♪

We knew at that point, Kali was the leader.

Who is this guy?

What kind of interaction do you have with him,

and what information can we get to lead us to the leadership?

At the time, they didn't arrest me.

They just took all my media devices except my cell phone.

I kind of realized without them taking my cell phone,

they had it tapped.

So Kali called me a couple hours later.

And he told me that the FBI was on the way to my house,

and I told him he was too late.

He asked me was I serious.

I said, "Very," and I told him to shut it down.

Adil Cassim, who is in his mid-30s

and lives at home in an apartment with his mom--

they raid his house, but they find almost nothing.

They find a bong,

and they find one CD where he's recorded his résumé

in Microsoft Word.

And in the author tab,

the user who controlled the computer--

Kali.

Oh, shit.

The trial for Kali and Dell was set

for March 10, 2010.

I met with this federal lawyer.

I gave him my paperwork, and he looked at me,

and he said, oh, this is nothing.

You ain't did nothing wrong.

I'm going to eat them alive on this.

He come back and told me,

"Man, they think you're the biggest dude

"ever came through Cleveland County.

"You got about 12 pages of stuff on you.

"You need to hire you another lawyer.

I'm gonna send you to a court-appointed lawyer."

My lawyer sucked,

and I hope he watches this.

He basically told me, you know, you don't want to go to trial.

You're gonna lose. Just plead guilty.

So my lawyer--he specialized in white-collar crimes,

and he kind of knows the ins and outs of the system.

He suggested that I cooperate with the government

through a proffer, which is, you can go talk to them,

but they can't use certain things

that you say against you.

I knew that they had prosecuted other groups in the past,

like APC, so they definitely knew, you know, the structure

and sort of what we were doing.

What they didn't know, per se, was sort of

the inner workings of RNS

and the members that were involved.

Really, they wanted Kali.

That's what they wanted.

Kali stood trial with Matthew Chow,

AKA RL,

another RNS pirate who paid for a specialized lawyer.

I came to represent Matthew Chow.

RL was his name on the chat rooms.

The government said, "This is the biggest

copyright infringement case that we have ever brought."

They made a big deal out of it. They were very cocky.

They asked me to fly out to Houston for the trial.

And I became, you know, a witness for the prosecutor.

It was stressful. It was my first time

being in a courtroom and actually come face-to-face

with Matthew and Adil.

I was basically a good mouthpiece

to explain to the jury, you know, what RNS was,

what the warez scenes was, kind of all the details

of, like, the structure of the group.

I went to trial with them in Houston, Texas.

All the questions they asked me while I was there--

I pretty much played stupid, because I didn't want

any of us to get in trouble.

So the Feds said, "Okay, you're done."

And I went back to my motel.

The trial was about a week long.

We didn't really fight the technical aspects of the case.

We more or less conceded that the music was copyrighted

and that we had infringed on it.

The government never could show

that Matthew or Kali did this willfully,

that they had knowledge of the law,

and their intent was to break the copyright laws.

Many of the jurors had kids,

and they were sitting there with horrified looks,

'cause they knew their kids had done the same thing, right?

[soft dramatic music]

♪ ♪

I felt like,

what is it that they have

that allowed them to fight

and win that I didn't?

And so what came to mind was money, for one.

In these type of cases, what we typically charge them with

is criminal copyright infringement.

They didn't charge me with copyright infringement.

They charged me with conspiracy.

It's just much harder to fight.

There were definitely points where I did feel guilty

of having to sell them out, in a sense,

because we did have that sort of friendship,

that relationship that was built over many years.

You're always at risk of being arrested

for this kind of thing.

If the FBI really wants you, they're going to get you.

The scariest thing about prison is,

you know, once you go, once you've been there,

it doesn't seem so scary.

I just really felt bad for those guys.

Now they will forever be convicted felons.

There's times where I have to get

background clearance for certain things,

and I'm afraid that it's going to come up.

And, you know, certain countries I can't go to.

So there's, you know, a lot of little things.

I think it was more harsh on my family and friends,

you know, seeing me there and feeling bad.

And, like, so...

For a digital file, something that's not tangible--

I think I would get less time if I robbed a bank, you know?

[pensive music]

It's nice and cool.

Cooled off a lot. It ain't humid.

♪ ♪

He's just good with gadgets,

computers and stuff like that.

Even now, something so simple with a computer,

I call him and ask him a question.

"Man, all you got to do is this and that."

He make it sound easy.

I said, "Look, let me tell you something.

It's easy to you, but it's hard to me, you know?"

He's a genius.

He's a genius with technology.

It's funny how life goes.

I mean, to think that an international industry got

turned on its head because of a man nobody thought

to look at twice in a town most people drive through,

never thinking to stop.

It was just me being a young teenager,

experimenting with a CD.

And I figured it out.

I was doing it just because I wanted

to share with the world, you know, the experience

of being able to download a song and listen to it

and not have to run to the store and buy it.

Same thing Netflix is doing right now.

Same thing Spotify is doing right now.

I was selling the stuff that, you know,

made everybody feel good.

What this one man did in leaking the music,

taught the leaders of the industry

that they had to change the business,

and thank God they did that.

Piracy led to Beats.

Rather than, "Let's stop music from being free,"

we said, "Well, it is free. What do we do?"

Thanks to Dell and the MP3 scene,

we're one step closer to a world

where artists can chart their own course

and fans can experience music in their own ways.

These are people that are valuable to the world.

They're geniuses.

Don't dismiss them because they figure out something that,

you know, maybe we couldn't figure out.

The real story of how music got free

is not about money.

It's about freedom.

Today streaming is growing at double digits.

If you like music. you have more opportunities,

more channels, more support,

more curation than ever before.

The artists themselves are just having

more direct relationships with the consumers.

The future's arrived.

Most call them pirates,

but they should call them...

pioneers.

pioneers.