I found this site dedicated to Kane Robinson, a man who, at the age of 23, went to prison for 32 months for music piracy. The site serves as a chronicle of the incident from start to finish and features an protracted interview conducted while he was in prison via emails—some of which were allegedly intercepted.
We safely assumed it was set up by some sort of East London dark web indie libertarian with seventeen disk burners, four monitors, and a black book of crooked industry contacts. But the bossman behind the entire operation was a young lad living with his parents in the North East of England, just using the home iMac in his bedroom between college and a part time job pushing trolleys at his local Tesco.
“It always makes me laugh when people emphasised in the news stories about me that I’d ran this whole thing from a bedroom on the North East coast,” says Kane. “Where else am I gonna run a fucking website from like? You make a website at home!”
Robinson ran a popular music forum called Dancing Jesus which had as many as 12,000 users. But the British Phonographic Industry thought the site was the cause of £240m worth of music theft and the courts agreed, sending him to prison. The media made him out to be a villainous hoodlum but, of course, this was all blown out of all proportion and if anything, Robinson was naïve and careless.