The LA Times has reported that an arrest was made by the FBI following a leak of unreleased material from old school rockers Guns n Roses. Kevin Cogill, a Culver City resident known as Skewl online, was arrested on suspicion of violating federal copyright law by posting the nine songs on his blog Antiquiet.

I’m not sure what possesses these people to do it, whether they think they are offering a service to the underground internet-savvy youth who torrent millions of songs every year. Well, unfortunately for them, there’s an internet-savvy federal department after them, and rightly so I say - what the culprits are doing is morally wrong.

With all the new laws coming into effect to give the FBI extra clout, I expect a few more of these stories. Although, I think they were devised with the big-wigs running huge file-sharing sites in mind, as opposed to some dude in suburbia blogging in his basement.

Now, 24 hours and many blog comments later, some people are saying how this smells kinda like a publicity stunt, some say the whole thing was set up to warn people off sharing / downloading illegally hosted music (My GNR forum has plenty of controversial comments to wade through). The fact that Cogill and friends were back on the blog talking about the case the day after the FBI took them in for questioning seems suspect.

I’m sure there’s a whole heap of rights and wrongs and in betweens, so feel free to pick a side and let the slanging begin in the comment section here…(!)

Lee.

Tags: FBI, Guns n Roses, leak, marketing, piracy, publicity stunt, unreleased album

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Lee Jarvis, Music Industry Gossip, Music Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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