US Music Piracy Site Operator Facing Five Years In Prison After Guilty Plea

A 23-year-old North Carolina man is facing up to five years in prison for music piracy as a result of his guilty plea in the District Court of east Virginia admitting to "reproducing and distributing without permission millions of infringing digital copies of copyrighted works".

As reported in a statement released by the Department Of Justice, Rocky P. Ouprasith, of Charlotte, was the owner and operator of RockDizMusic.com and RockDizFile.com, a pair of sister sites described by TorrentFreak as both being involved in "large-scale distribution of unauthorised music, with the former presenting itself as a music database and the latter its file-hosting partner".

According to the court documents, Ouprasith ran RockDizMusic.com from May 2011 until mid-October last year, providing over the years a service "where internet users could find and download infringing digital copies of popular, copyrighted songs and albums for free".

"Ouprasith willfully and illegally reproduced and distributed infringing copies of such content in the following manner," the documents read. "First, Ouprasith sought out and found digital copies of copyrighted songs and albums online. Second, Ouprasith encouraged and solicited others, referred to as 'affiliates' or as registered or premium account users, to seek and to upload digital copies of copyrighted songs and albums to RockDizFile.com.

"To encourage such activity, Ouprasith agreed to pay these affiliates based upon the number of times copies of the affiliates' songs and albums were downloaded from his website."

The documents go on to detail Ouprasith's methods in terms of organising the uploaded content, making them available for reproduction and download, and his ultimate goal in terms of the design of the website, which was "to reproduce and distribute infringing copies of the copyrighted music and albums … all without permission from copyright owners".

Not only that, but he was making money out of it too, charging users up to $90 a year for "premium" accounts as well as netting deals with "at least" nine advertising firms. Considering his reported audience base of about 1.65 million site visits from 937,000 unique visitors in January 2014, his bottom line from paying customers and ad services wasn't exactly tragic — it's calculated in Skype records submitted to the court to have resulted in Ouprasith making about $80,000 in a year, albeit in the face of roughly $60,000 in operating expenses (still, a $20,000 profit for a service built on other people's property is nothing to sneeze at).

As noted by TorrentFreak, RockDizFile.com had become "the second-largest online file-sharing site in the reproduction and distribution of infringing copies of copyrighted music in the United States", resulting in heightened attention from the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the issuing of multiple takedown notices, with which Ouprasith complied only at the most surface of levels: removing the infringing content before re-uploading it.

A warrant was executed in October last year to search his North Carolina property, at which time a server — as well as additional servers in Europe — was seized; Ouprasith did not contest the arrest or consequent charges; "after being advised of his rights orally and in writing, Ouprasith waived them and agreed to speak with investigators," the court documents said.

As a result of his guilty plea, Ouprasith will not go to trial, but now awaits sentencing at a future date this year, at which point, according to TorrentFreak, he faces anywhere up to five years in prison over his for-profit infringements, estimated to be valued between $2.5 million and $7 million.

Read the full court documents here.