Digital Legal

Sony Music data grabbers are innocent Michael Jackson fans, says lawyer

By | Published on Thursday 8 March 2012

Sony Music

A legal rep for the two hackers accused of breaking into a Sony Music server and accessing over 50,000 files, including a lot of unreleased Michael Jackson material, has said she is confident her clients will be found not guilty of the various copyright and computer misuse charges that were thrown in their direction last week.

It also turns out that, rather than being sinister and secretive hacktivists attempting to bring down the empire of the evil copyright exploiting Sony Corp, the defendants in this case are obsessive Jacko fans who possibly got a bit carried away.

I don’t know whether solicitor Karen Todner is also a Jackson fanatic, though her statement about her clients’ apparent innocence makes her sound like one. She told reporters that James Marks and Jamie McCormick “are eager to point out to Michael Jackson’s fans and family that they would never do anything to harm the legacy that is Michael Jackson’s music. As Michael Jackson has said, lies run sprints but the truth runs marathons”.

As previously reported, Sony Music discovered one of its digital content servers had been hacked from a British IP address last spring and reported the matter to the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency. They arrested the defendants last May, but the story only recently came to light when the accused men’s case first came to court.

Sony says it informed artists who were affected by the data grab, including the Michael Jackson estate, but that it made no public statement because no customer information was accessed.



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