On August 30, 2007, Graduation hit the topsites of the Scene, with OSC taking credit for the leak. Within hours, Kali was calling Glover in anguish. We got beat, man! How did we get beat? Glover told him he wasn’t sure. He lied, explaining he hadn’t seen the album at the plant yet. But, he said, Curtis, yeah, I saw that at the plant today. I’ll have it to you soon. On September 4, 2007, Kali released Curtis to the Scene. He credited the leak to the Scene group SAW—a nonsense acronym that stood for nothing.

Universal officially released the albums on Tuesday, September 11. Despite the leaks, they both sold well. Curtis moved 600,000 copies in its first week; Graduation sold nearly a million. Kanye won the sales contest, even though Glover had leaked his album first. Glover was surprised—he’d just run a controlled experiment on the effects of leaking on music sales, an experiment that suggested that, at least in this case, the album that was leaked first actually did better. Regardless, Glover was happy with the outcome. In the days since the leak, Graduation had grown on Glover. He still didn’t like Kanye, but he felt he deserved his victory, and Fifty didn’t retire after all.

Besides, Glover figured, they were still getting paid. Fifty had nickel-sized diamond earrings and a founder’s stake in Vitamin Water. Kanye dated runway models and wore an obnoxious gold pharaonic necklace reportedly worth 300,000 dollars. Two months earlier, Doug Morris had purchased a ten-million-dollar condominium overlooking Central Park. Dell Glover, by contrast, worked 3,000 hours a year in a factory to pay his child support, and he had beaten them all at their own game with a rubber glove and a belt buckle.

The day after the release, Glover went to work at the EDC plant. He had a double shift lined up, lasting the entire night. Starting at 6:00 in the evening, he worked six hours regular pay, plus six hours overtime. He finished at 6:00 in the morning on September 13. As he was preparing to leave, a coworker pulled him aside. There’s someone out there, the coworker said. Someone I’ve never seen before. And they’re hanging around your truck.

In the twilight before dawn Glover walked through the parking lot. He saw three men, strangers, who did indeed seem to be staking out his truck. As he approached the vehicle, he pulled the key fob out of his pocket. The men stared at him but took no action. Then he pressed the remote, the truck chirped, and the men drew their guns and told him to put his hands in the air.

The men were from the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office. They informed Glover that the FBI was currently searching his house, and that they had been sent to retrieve him. Glover looked at the men. He was still holding the key fob in his upraised hand. He asked if he was under arrest. They said that he was not, but that they were going to accompany him on the drive back to his house.

Twenty long minutes on the road followed. Glover’s mind went blank. Arriving home, he found an ugly scene. In his front yard were a half dozen FBI agents wearing bulletproof vests, accompanied by a SWAT team. His neighbor, who didn’t like the police, was yelling at them to leave Glover’s family alone. The agents were yelling at her to go back inside. As he walked through his front door, he noticed it had been kicked in. He proceeded to the kitchen, where he found his girlfriend Karen Barrett holding their infant son. On her face was a look of bewilderment, or perhaps recrimination, and there were tears in her eyes.

Special Agent Peter Vu introduced himself. I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Vu said. More than five years. Your friend Dockery has already spilled his guts. You’d better start talking.

Glover asked to see the FBI’s search warrant. Vu showed it to him. Glover read it closely, hoping that the terms of the warrant didn’t extend to his vehicle. If they did, and the FBI searched its CD player, they’d find what they were probably looking for: the leaked copy of Kanye West’s Graduation.

CHAPTER 18

By the end of 2007 compact disc sales had fallen by 50 percent from their 2000 peak, and that was with aggressive price discounting. Digital sales of legal mp3s didn’t begin to make up the difference. Both margins and profits were squeezed, and once again Morris had been forced to fire hundreds of employees across every department.

Meanwhile, Project Hubcap was rolling to a stop. The RIAA’s educational lawsuits against the file-sharing public had had no discernible effect, even though they had yet to lose a case. The vast majority of the accused had settled. A small number of cases had been dropped, but only one—out of almost 17,000—had been brought to a jury trial. On October 4, 2007, Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minnesota, was found liable for infringing the copyrights on 24 songs she had downloaded off Kazaa. The jury ruled that she owed the recording industry $9,250 a song—a total of $222,000. (Thomas appealed the ruling.)

For Universal’s lawyers, the finding was a vindication of the RIAA’s strategy. Average citizens with no vested interest in copyright law had found in favor of the recording companies, and awarded surprisingly heavy damages. You really could sue the average file-sharer, and you could win. Thomas’ case was a landmark judgment.

But from a financial perspective, the RIAA’s victory was a farce. Thomas, a single mother of two who lived in a small rented apartment and worked on an Ojibwe Indian reservation, would be bankrupted by the judgment. Regardless of the outcome of the appeals, it was widely understood that the RIAA would only ever receive a small fraction of the damages. It was also widely conceded, even by the RIAA’s lawyers, that Thomas herself was digitally unsophisticated, with only a limited understanding of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology and no connection whatsoever to the elite-level Scene members and torrenters who actually ran the world of music piracy. She was the music industry’s sacrificial martyr.

Contrast that with a real pirate. A month before the Thomas ruling, the FBI, after years of effort, had finally broken the Rabid Neurosis crew and picked up the Scene’s inside man: Bennie Lydell Glover. Here was a packaging line manager who on his own initiative had leaked almost 2,000 albums over the course of more than eight years—the man who destroyed the music industry to put rims on his car. Glover had pleaded guilty and was now offering to testify against his coconspirators, but the RIAA would never seek financial damages.

The problems continued: quasi-legal digital storage lockers like Megaupload began to appear; peer-to-peer file-sharing moved to torrent sites; rival leaking groups emerged to take RNS’ place. The war on piracy looked like the war on drugs: costly and probably unwinnable, even in the face of felony criminal prosecutions. Lil Wayne’s new album Tha Carter III was the first to capitalize on his post-Dedication fame, but it was leaked too—not by Glover, but by one of Wayne’s own producers. The leak came months in advance, and Wayne responded by creating a new “intermediate” album titled simply The Leak.

Between 2006 and 2008 Wayne had appeared on at least 200 tracks as a featured artist, not even counting his own mixtapes and albums. The entirety of his output during this period was impossible to catalog. This ubiquity brought mainstream attention, and when the final version of Tha Carter III arrived in stores, it was a hit—sort of. The album moved nearly three million copies and was the bestselling release of 2008. But it failed to do even half the business that Get Rich or Die Tryin’ had done just five years earlier. The same numbers in 2000 wouldn’t have put it in the top ten.