“If 50 Cent was a rapper in Australia,” says one local club DJ caustically, “he’d have been arrested rather than making the record industry $50 million.”
One minute you’re mixing CDs in your bedroom, the next, the federal police are knocking on your door. And if you’re a DJ, you can expect a visit, too. Richard Guilliatt reports on the music industry’s all-out war on piracy.
If DJ Ace ever abandons music – which is possible, given that the multinational record companies had him arrested recently – he could probably make a living as a stand-up comic. The self-styled “Pimp Daddy” of Sydney’s hip-hop scene was once a perennial clown on late-night internet chat sites, where he entertained fellow DJs by showing his flair for sexual braggadocio, inventing fictitious episodes of The Jerry Springer Show or uploading photos from his 19th birthday party at the Mercure Hotel in Sydney – the party that featured a Spider-Man cake and a fat-a-gram stripper who pinned Ace to the carpet while his friends laughed riotously in the background.
Which is not to belittle Ace’s DJ-ing skills, for his remixes of popular rap and club tunes proliferated across the web, as did his mix CDs – Blazin’ Up, Club Ace and Spades. Like a lot of young DJs, Ace compiled them on his home computer, in a bedroom at his parents’ house in the south-western suburbs of Sydney (because even a Pimp Daddy can have trouble paying his own rent). He’d sample a song, pull it apart and put it back together with different beats, new vocal lines or whacked-out samples of dialogue, then send it out on the internet and invite comments. In the virtual music community that Ace and his peers inhabit, it’s the way you show your skills; it’s a scene in which guitar and drums have been replaced by CD-ROM and Pro Tools, where even the lingo has its own jump-cut rhythm in which gangsta slang is spliced with techie jargon.
“‘Sup people!” Ace announced cheerfully at the beginning of this year. “My new CD, DJ Ace – Pimpology has been completed and will be available for downloading on March 17 on two web servers, FTPs and MIRC channels. Details will be available on my website. In the meantime, visit the website and vote for your favourite Pimpology cover design.”
What DJ Ace surely never imagined was that the Australian federal police were monitoring his online antics as part of Operation Mezn, an investigation into music piracy launched by the record industry. And on April 23, Ace’s parents answered a knock on the door and found themselves face-to-face with a contingent of cops armed with a search warrant. They came into the house, took Ace’s computer and arrested him, taking him to police headquarters where he was charged with copyright violations for which he could face five years in jail.
When Ace appeared in court at Sydney’s Downing Centre on May 13, he was plain old Tommy Le of Punchbowl, a clean-cut, spikey-haired, sober-looking teenage student in a dark suit and tie, hands clasped in front of him as if waiting for handcuffs. His co-defendants – Charles Kok Hau Ng and Peter Tran, both 20-year-old information technology students – were similarly attired. The trio have been accused of setting up an internet site, Mp3WmaLand, which allegedly enabled the world’s computer users to illegally download $60 million worth of music.
