As was reported in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution yesterday, the two mixtape DJs who go by the name of Drama
and Cannon will be in court today facing charges of state
racketeering connected to music piracy. Drama (Tyree Simmons)
and Cannon (Donald Cannon) were in court this morning before Judge
Richard Hicks. The court session was the first opportunity for both
sides of the case to discuss and ultimately decide how the case will proceed.
Drama and Cannon are expected to be in court to face their charges.
Their “Gangsta Grillz” series was what led authorities to accuse them
of selling illegally recorded music “materials” through the
Internet. Police believe the sheer volume of what they were doing is in
violation of Georgia’s Racketeernig Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Both men face one to five years in
prison and fines ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 if convicted. Simmons and
Cannon have been free on $100,000 signature bonds since last Wednesday,
a day after Clayton County and Fulton County sheriff’s deputies raided their
Walker Street warehouse in Atlanta.
Police said they confiscated more
than 81,000 illegal CD’s, four vehicles, recording equipment and other items.
Authorities also have frozen the Simmons‘ and Cannon‘s bank
accounts.
Their arrests resulted from an
investigation that began late last year after Morrow police discovered illegal
“mixtape” CDs sold at an outlet in that Clayton County city, then
traced their origin to the Walker Street location.
The case is one of the latest in a
national crackdown on music piracy the Washington, D.C.-based Recording
Industry Association of America is pursuing in attempt to curb the practice it
says contributed to the loss of an estimated $1 billion in CD sales in 2005.
That year, Atlanta had the third largest number of seized illegal copied CDs in
the nation behind New York and Los Angeles.
The case will set a precedent as
there has never been a mixtape DJ whose gone to court, let alone charges of
Racketeering. Orlando McGhee, who runs the Aphilliates company
with Drama, Cannon and third Aphilliate DJ Sense says,
“We can’t make any comments at this time.”
In seperate news, the popular file-trading website, Rapidshare is coming under
fire and as p2pnet.net reports German collections agency GEMA
says it’s won temporary injunctions against the operator of data exchange
services www.rapidshare.de and www.rapidshare.com.
“The services make virtual
storage space available into which users can upload content that is thereby
made publicly available to other users. GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer
told Heise GEMA is now demanding details, “on how many copyright
protected works of GEMA members are currently stored on the said sites”.
RapidShare says it had no knowledge
of content uploaded and wasn’t able to control it, says the story, going on:
“Through its injunctions the
District Court in Cologne had now however made it clear to the company that the
fact that it was the users and not the operator of the services that uploaded
the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point of view, lessen the
operator’s liability for copyright infringements that occurred within the
context of the services”.