The King of Pop remains as popular as ever with hackers last week allegedly stealing a large number of music files from Sony Music according to Reuters.
In 2010, a year after Michael Jackson’s death, Sony Music, a unit of Sony Corps, signed a deal with Jackson’s estate to release 10 albums that cover previously unreleased material as well as his back catalogue.
The agreement is reportedly one of the biggest in music history, priced at having a value of around $250 million. This enormous figure has been called speculation on the part of the press according to sources close to the label.
Last week two men, James Marks and James McCormick, fronted a British court accused of offences associated with the alleged security breach. They were charged in September after being arrested last May.
Marks and McCormick denied the charges under the Computer Misuse Act and the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act at Leicester Crown Court. They have been remanded on bail and are due to stand trial in January next year.
“We confirmed the breach last May and immediately took steps to secure the site and notify authorities,” Sony Music said in a statement. “As a result, the two suspects were arrested. There was no consumer data involved in the incident.”
According to Reuters, ‘sources could not confirm media reports that tens of thousands of files, most of them by Jackson, were allegedly downloaded illegally, although files can vary from entire tracks to small snippets of music.’
The security breach comes less than 12 months after hackers accessed the personal information of 77 million PlayStation Network and Oriocity accounts. Sony was forced to admit that hackers had stolen data from 25 million accounts on its Sony Online Entertainment PC games network.
According to industry insiders there is no link between the large-scale hacking cases and the missing Jackson files.
