A hacker selling unreleased music on the dark web has avoided jail time despite facing serious charges for copyright infringement
Luton: So, there’s this 22-year-old hacker named Skylar Dalziel who got into some serious trouble for selling unreleased songs from big-name artists on the dark web. She made a whopping £42,000 from it but, surprisingly, she won’t be going to jail.
Instead, she got a 21-month prison sentence, which is suspended for two years. This means she won’t serve time unless she messes up again. She faced 14 counts for trading copyrighted music without permission from the artists or their labels.
Last January, police raided her home and found hard drives packed with nearly 292,000 music tracks, including unreleased gems from Coldplay and Shawn Mendes. She got her hands on these tracks by hacking into cloud storage accounts linked to the artists.
They even found a spreadsheet showing she had sold these tracks to various customers. It’s wild! The investigation kicked off after the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry tipped off the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.
They discovered that she had bought six unreleased tracks using Bitcoin, which were not available for sale. A look into her PayPal and bank accounts revealed she raked in over £42,000 from April 2021 to January 2023.
In court, she pleaded guilty to nine copyright offenses and four computer misuse offenses. Besides the suspended sentence, she’s also got to do 180 hours of unpaid work and attend 10 rehabilitative activity days.
The court ordered that all her equipment related to the crime be destroyed. Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt made it clear that stealing music hurts artists and the industry, leading to job losses.
Richard Partridge from the Crown Prosecution Service added that Dalziel showed no respect for the hard work artists put into their music. It’s a real shame that she chose to profit off their creativity by selling it online.
