Two Brits in court over Michael Jackson back catalogue hack Two British men have denied hacking into Sony's systems and downloading 50,000 files covering Michael Jackson's entire back catalogue - including unreleased songs. James Marks, 26, from Daventry in Northamptonshire, and James McCormick, 25, from Blackpool, appeared at Leicester Crown Court charged with computer hacking and …
Makes a change having Brits accused of copyright theft actually being tried in the UK.
Or maybe it was the Sony parent corporation rather than the USA company.
Either way it would be interesting to know why the CPS decided that UK prosecution was the right option this time when they seem to enjoy sending accused Brits abroad.
Why the hell is this kind of thing being dealt with by SOCA?!
It is NOT a serious crime!! Stealing a penny sweet from a corner shop is a more serious crime than copying files like this from a server somewhere. This deprives Sony of nothing, and the only effect (assuming the files weren't distributed, which the article doesn't mention) is to force Sony to close a security hole in their network, which they should be doing anyway.
Serious crimes cause serious harm. Even if the files were distributed and it could be proven that this cost Sony significant amounts of money, it is still not a SERIOUS crime. There is not enough detail to know if it was "organised crime", but I would guess not, just a couple of "hackers" operating on their own.
SOCA my arse! They should go out and meet some victims of REAL, SERIOUS CRIME to get their priorities right, families of murder victims, victims of assault etc. Or, at the very least, be renamed so the name actually portrays what they are dealing with. I wish I had the imagination to fit a decent backronym to a descriptive word.
While this is a lot more serious then run of the mill piracy, after all someone did hack into a secure network, a crime, to me "serious crime" involves possible or actual bodily harm done to someone.
No matter how "elite" you are, hacking into a network and nicking songs is very unlikely to physically hurt someone.
this type of acts undermines the business trust, which could cause less investment and loss of business. which in turn leads to less work for the people in the country where this problem originated. Those who say this is not a serious crime are digital age retards. Information will be/is the most important asset in the near to far future. It will be what will cause bankrupcies. Imagine this: due to hacking of the secure networks of maclaren a Chinese company got all their secrets; in two years they come with a cheap Chinese maclaren (cheap because no R&D really), same design, etc. They might even disguise it as a European car to make it sexier. 2 more years later maclaren is reduced to nought - all those thousands of people at maclaren are not employed in UK anymore but in China (Chinese people yeah). Without this kind of work the middle class dwindles and the social stability it provides is diminished as well. Soon the robbery gets rampant in the city of maclaren and people start to get killed. How's that for a nightmare scenario because of a digital crime?
A record is kept of IP addresses assigned to customers. Each record contains a minimum of the IP address, the MAC address, the customer, the date and time, and the length of lease.
No records are kept (by the ISP) of source and destination IP (and port) addresses for each TCP connection
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I wasn't aware they were selling them, only that they were caught hacking into and downloading unauthorised files from Sony corp.
Maybe I am reading this wrong but ...
"Marks and McCormick were arrested by officers from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency in May before charges of violations against the Computer Misuse Act and Copyright, Designs and Patents Act were filed last September, a SOCA spokesman confirmed"
This sound like they were arrested prior to being convicted of anything. What am I missing?
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"Marks and McCormick" sounds like the beginnings of a security/forensics firm...
I wonder if those 50,000 include stuff from ~ 1999, which had Michael Jackson, Alice Cooper (or similar), with Aniken, Samuel L. Jackson (images from Pulp Fiction, explaining the Nabu Royale Big Mack fro Tatooine or somesuch) and about MJ adopting (buying) Aniken from his mom, who puportedly sold her body to males...
It was a crazy-assed posting, (maybe around 40 or so slides) and was so raunchy (you can guess) that it eventually was completely removed from the Internets. I only saw it a few days, and only stumbled upon it when trying to find URLs to First Class Postal System (by SoftArc). Strangely, the FCP string brought back that site. Every couple of years I search on the off chance that someone resurfaced the repo. But, I fail to find it, and each time I fail, I figure somebody got their ass sued so badly they invented a time machine to delete every bit and byted and flipped all the 1s and 0s to erase the caches.
It was quite funny or interesting for some, but I imagine M Jackson's lawyers summoned time slayers, hence the "unfindability". So, if Sony somehow was given those files in the event of chain of custody and lineage reasons to take ownership of a potential future lawsuit, then I can imagine Sony being upset from a *legal* perspective. But, if two Brits could hack Sony's systems, surely domestic Japanese and numerous Chinese and North Korean operatives with a lot more to gain also made penetrations all over Japan, and Sony.
Factual Disclaimer: I did not retain nor make any copies... And, the computer that it was downloaded to was probably wiped in year 2000, when I changed departments.
..Which is probably why it was clarified that 50,000 files did not mean 50,000 songs mate.
and it is perfectly reasonable to have many versions of particular songs, or even takes with mistakes etc. not that i am speculating that this was what was downloaded by our two 'sophisticated to a degree' cyber crooks here.
SOCA is such a waste. dreadful.
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