(antiMusic) Terrorists, band robbers, kidnappers and mass murderers can breath a sigh of relief as the FBI have far more important business to tend to: protecting Axl Rose's copyrights. A California music blogger was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly violating federal copyright law by posting nine unreleased Guns N' Roses songs on his website.Back in June the blogger posted the songs on his blog Antiquiet.com. The tracks are believed to have come from the alleged "Chinese Democracy" album that Axl Rose has been working on for well over a decade.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the 27-year-old blogger Kevin Cogill (a.k.a. Kevin Skwerl) was arrested at his Culver City home Wednesday Morning after admitting to the FBI in June that he has posted the material on his website. Shortly after word leaked out about the leaked songs, the web traffic overwhelmed the website's server and Cogill joked at the time that they had broken the Internet. Cogill removed the files from his server after receiving a cease and desist notice from Axl Rose's attorneys.
It is still unclear how Cogill got his hands of the material. At the time of the leak there were unconfirmed reports that someone had emailed the files to Cogill, who is reportedly a former employee of Guns N' Roses' record company parent Universal Records. Speculation is that the songs were leaked while they were be prepared for the alleged release of the 14-years in the making album.
Cogill said that he destroyed the files as soon as he heard from the Guns N' Roses camp and in fact said that someone from the band's circle got a hold of him directly. He told Rollingstone in June that he was contacted by "a really cool guy from the GN'R camp that was a middle man between someone who was very angry and me. He was trying to reach out and see if I'd go without a fight, which is more or less what I did."
After being questioned by the FBI about the source of the leak, Cogill didn't seem worried about legal consequences when he said, "It's a legal grey area since it wasn't for download, it wasn't a finished product. We aren't sure who owns the recordings. I feel like I might survive this."
Axl Rose's attorneys took aggressive measures to stop the leak, going as far as sending us a cease and desist letter, which was rather curious as we have never hosted music files (legal or illegal) on our server, let alone these files; nor did we provide a direct link to the leaked files, we simply posted a Constitutionally protected news story about the leak on Cogill's blog.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian told the Los Angeles Times that Cogill was expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles sometime on Wednesday. We will update you when we hear more. For now it is advised that you take those FBI notices at the beginning of DVDs more serious in the future.
