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A man and a woman have been arrested today by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit after they were suspected of earning £350,000 by selling hard drives filled with illegally downloaded music. The couple would sell drives containing around 200,000 songs and music videos, the scheme made them a pretty large chunk of money too.
Head of the PIPCU, DCI Daniel Medlycott, gave a statement, noting the importance of our creative industries: “Not only are we recognized worldwide as producing great films, TV and music but these industries are playing a large part in supporting our country financially, contributing a huge £71.4 billion to the UK economy and supporting 1.68 million jobs.”
The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has been up and running for around a year, having launched during September last year. Since then several IP crime arrests have been made but nobody has been successfully prosecuted. The two biggest cases so far involved a man being arrested for running a proxy server, allowing users to bypass court ordered blocks and access region restricted content. Additionally, a man was arrested and later released without charges for running a series of illegal sports streaming sites.
According to Medleycott, the PIPCU is “committed to tacking individuals that think they can exploit others' copyrighted material for their own financial gain.”
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KitGuru Says: £350,000 is a lot of money to make from selling off illegally downloaded music. I can't think of any reason as to why someone would bother buying a hard drive filled with pirated music when they could just do it themselves if they wanted it that badly, but that might just be me.
Noobs would buy a HDD pre-filled I guess.
some people with really crappy bandwidth don’t wanna wait months to download a couple terabytes worth of stuff or meddle with torrents and risk getting viruses, so I can see what their customer base was.
Problem is when you start selling hdd’s full of illegally downloaded music and do it enough to make £350K you go from being a small fish in a big pond to a big fish and that’s when you get noticed by the authorities.
Downloading a few hundred tracks for personal use won’t get you noticed but when you download hundreds of thousands and distribute and make a large wad of cash then you deserve everything you get for your own stupidity and greed.