RockDizMusic Website Owner Pleads Guilty in Copyright Infringement Case

Rocky Ouprasith, the 23-year-old owner of the file-sharing websites RockDizMusic and RockDizFile, pleaded guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in Norfolk to one count of criminal copyright infringement, the Department of Justice said. Ouprasith admitted to operating RockDizMusic.com between May 2011 and October 2014 via servers in Canada and France. The Recording Industry Association of America ranked RockDizMusic as the No. 2 music piracy website in the U.S. in 2013. The website distributed digital copies of copyrighted songs obtained from “affiliates,” whom Ouprasith paid based on the number of times each file was downloaded from the site. Ouprasith admitted to operating the associated RockDizFile.com via servers in France, the Netherlands and Russia. He also admitted to ignoring complaints in 2013 and 2014 from copyright owners and their representatives and to pretending to take action in response to those complaints. The material on RockDizMusic.com and RockDizFile.com was worth more than $2.5 million, DOJ said. Federal law enforcement shut down the websites in October, while agencies in France and the Netherlands seized servers that hosted the sites’ material. Ouprasith is to be sentenced Nov. 17 and faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.