The man who pioneered online piracy

Music piracy and the illegal downloading of music is affecting both the music industry as well as music artists too.

The illegal sharing can be dated back to when CD-burning was first introduced. An article in American publication, the New Yorker highlights online piracy and the selling of pirated music. The article singles out out Bennie Lydell Glover as the pioneer of online piracy.

Bennie Lydell Glover was previously an employee at CD manufacturing plant, PolyGram. In his interview with the publication, Glover exposes how employees from the factory would take CDs from the plant and use them in their homes even though it was against policy.

Glover was also had a computer at home and later on he purchased a CD burner. With his CD burner Glover began selling mix tapes to his friends.

Glover later visited a MP3 trading chat channel where he downloaded software for an MP3 player and the requested for the IRC bots of the channel to serve him filles. After a few minutes Glover had a small collection of songs on his hard drive.

One of the songs that he got was California Love by Tupac Shakur. Glover spent more than $2000 on burners and other hardware in order to produce them individually. His livelihood was dependent on the demand of the product.

By the time Glover had seven burners in his home, his company was doing random searches and caught people that were taking CDs out of the plant. With the seven burners he could do thirty copies in an hour which was more profitable for his business and the searched the internet for other things like Playstation games to sell.

He then moved onto pirating movies and with new technology he could fit an entire feature film on a CD. Although the video quality was bad his business was doing well.

By 2001 Glover was the world’s main leaker of pre-release music and claimed that he never smuggled the CDs himself. He would low paid temporary employees get the leaked disks and swop them for movies or money.

Glover would later be arrested and indicted on one count of felony conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. He plead guilty to the charge and later testified against a member of an internet piracy group called RNS in exchange for leniency.

RNS, according to the United States Department of Justice leaked more than 20000 albums. Glover served three months in jail.