Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Song Theft on the Net: unpublished songs by Lady Gaga and Shakira online

The world's largest record companies shake a couple of young Germans. The hack into the computers of famous musicians and their managers, unpublished songs by Lady Gaga and Shakira online. Two were caught, the others continue. Every morning at nine in Wesel: M. Christian is still in bed, dozing in his room in the basement.

A morning like every morning that is not worth getting up. On this day no one is out there waiting for him. If no one want to know something about a boy who has chucked the vocational college and now out of work wasted, at 22, his hours at the computer. No one. Apart from Lady Gaga. Mariah Carey.


Leona Lewis. It is 26 August 2010, in an area with red brick semi-detached houses on the Lower Rhine, rises as the bottom of the cellar door and Lady Gaga bursts, along with Mariah Carey and Leona Lewis. Or rather: it is the police, who stands at his bedside, Christian's sister, has admitted it.

A flashlight emits Christian face, he blinks, and finally a male voice says: ". You know why we are here" And yes, Christian may be already thinking: Lady Gaga, Mariah Carey, Leona Lewis, a few other superstars, they all chased him. They and their record labels Universal and Sony, the American FBI, the Federal Criminal Office.

The two largest music companies, the best investigators in the world. Now they have found him. A boy who looks more like 17 and after 22, barely even a few sentences at a time and says the cross-eyed when he takes off his glasses. The man's voice is a Commissioner of the CID Duisburg, he does not need long to bring them to a Christian confession.

What is Christian deny? His mobile hard disk, the other night, he always hid in the basement next door, is located on the desktop. The treasure stolen from the industry, the police found: a few thousand songs, Christian and other hackers have stolen from the computers of singers and music producers.

Not just any track, but the treasure of the industry. Songs that were not yet on the market. Only seven weeks earlier, had the detectives another room in Duisburg searched, the operations center of Denise A., 17, hacker name "DJ Stolen". Together, the two unreleased songs were sold to buyers in Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.

When it comes Deniz but still more: there are chat logs that can be read as if he had blackmailed world stars. Fearing DJ Stolen could their pieces upload it and they break so that the campaign for the next hit, they sent Denise a "Shout", a few spoken sentences that sound as though they were miners, the star and the hacker.

Thus, a shout is the most precious trophy after a successful attack - he should show that one of the hardest Deniz as gangsta rapper who has proudest soul queen in the hand. Can it really be? A basement room in Wesel, a nursery in Duisburg, two young boys from Germany, but the coolest glitter and glamorous stars of a billion dollar industry trembled before them? The case in which the prosecutor determines Duisburg, leads into an unknown world, which only emerged in the past three years, with its own rules, with a "modus operandi is still largely unknown," as it says in a CID report.

A competition of the hacker who cracked the computers of the most famous pop stars good hundred young hackers in Germany, estimates Christian, are competing to see who hits the computer of the most famous pop stars, their managers, their record companies, their relatives or friends. Their goal is, pieces that could still hear a fan, to put it online, for other hackers.

The bigger the star, the greater the prestige, the "fame", but also the value of the songs. For at least some of the Internet pirates continue to sell the loot, as Christian and Deniz. The music companies Universal and Sony are so nervous that her law firm Hamburger Rasch does not want to say first whether it has a mandate in the matter.

The concern is that it could become a mass phenomenon and the damage is always greater. The U.S. singer Usher, for example, by 2009 a fully produced album threw away, because the pieces are already circulating on the net. But even after the raids at Christian and Denise is hunting the hacker on to fresh songs: Although U.S.

authorities have recently closed down its main venue, the website rmx4u. com. But now there is a new, the name sounds similar, except that this time the server is in Tonga in the South Seas. Christian sits in the living room of his parents, small, narrow, and because he does not like, would prefer to say nothing, you could almost overlook that he's there.

A frayed jeans, a black Adidas track jacket, all no more striking. In front of the house is no car, no bikes, he has not even once a moped license. Instead, he has the money he earned with stolen songs, bought a new pair of glasses from Apollo-Optik, for 150 €, a laminate floor for his room, a Playstation.

Things like that, nothing big. His mother says that Christian was never easy. Even with three years ago he was operated on for the first time because he squinted so, the first of four interventions. He was always the smallest, for a time the parents even thought it might be pathologically short stature.

And Christian had quickly come to terms with the fact that he was therefore just a victim forever. In the football club they called him a "dwarf", in the judo club "fish eye" in school "cobra". He then pulled back each time, but he got used to and to forgive everything that went wrong else with him.

After the sixth grade, he had to depart from the real school, secondary school, he managed only barely so. Thereafter, except for a few internships nothing. His mother complains that it all these years "lazy" was not even Christian defends herself when she says that. "But with the hook," he says, "but all that has nothing to do." Investigators have other ideas.

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