A hacker who stole unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and rapper Lil Uzi Vert and provided them on the market on-line has been jailed for 18 months.
Adrian Kwiatkowski stole two songs from Sheeran and 12 songs from American rapper Vert and tried to alternate them for cryptocurrency, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) mentioned.
The 23-year-old from Ipswich made £131,000, based on police.
Kwiatkowski’s laptop computer was searched and 565 audio information from dozens of artists have been discovered, together with Vert and Sheeran’s songs, the CPS mentioned.
He admitted receiving Bitcoin cryptocurrency for the songs and was jailed at Ipswich Crown Court on Friday.
Joanne Jakymec of the CPS mentioned Kwiatkowski had “complete disregard for the musicians’ creativity” and “selfishly stole their music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web”.
Kwiatkowski admitted three costs of unauthorised entry to pc materials, 14 costs of constructing on the market an article infringing copyright, one cost of changing legal property and two costs of possession of legal property.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation in 2019 after administration firms of a number of musicians reported that somebody identified on-line as Spirdark had gained entry to accounts and was promoting the content material.
The investigation linked the e-mail handle used to arrange Spirdark’s cryptocurrency account to Kwiatkowski and recognized the IP handle of the gadget used to hack one of many accounts as his dwelling handle.
In September 2019 Kwiatkowski was arrested by officers from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), a part of City of London Police.
They seized seven units, together with a tough drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists.
A doc saved on the drive summarised the tactic he had used to acquire them, and Bitcoin, then price £64,000, was additionally seized.
Kwiatkowski admitted to police that he had hacked the musicians and offered their songs on-line and confirmed he used the alias Spirdark.
Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt, from the PIPCU, mentioned: “Not only did he cause several artists and their production companies significant financial harm, he deprived them of the ability to release their own work.”
Source: information.sky.com”