We're Watching You

Subject: We're Watching You Thu Feb 16, 2012 10:03 pm

Article from the Metro Newspaper Today (16/2/12)

A popular music site was shut yesterday over allegations it offered illegal downloads that cost musicians £15 million a year. Visitors to RnBXclusive's homepage found a message form the Serious Organised Crimes Agency ( SOCA) that warned they could face upto 10 years in jail and an unlimited fine if they had used it to download material.
SOCA has the capability to monitor you and can inform your ISP of these infringements, it added. In a statement SOCA said 'much of the music offered for download by RnBXclusive was illegally obtained from artists, leading the industry to attribute losses of approx £15 million per year to this activity.
A man from Leicester was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and bailed pending further inquiries. The site believed to have been hosted abroad, had 70,000 daily users - mainly men aged 18-25 in the week leading to it's 'arrest phase'. One of RnBXclusive's 10.000 twitter followers posted: they have people's IP address's and everything!'
After RnBXclusive was taken down, one music site claimed it was taking itself offline, another was considering it and a third stated that it would deal only in legal music files. Site users were also deleting their histories, detectives said.
Loz Kaye, leader of the Pirate Party UK told the BBC ' the explicit threat to visitors of the site and take down notice is alarming.'
It comes after Megaupload, one of the web's biggest file sharing sites was shut down last month by US officials amid allegations it cost copyright holders more than £320 million.