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Kamal Ghali Recognized by the RIAA for Combatting Massive Digital IP Theft Campaign
On May 13, 2019, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recognized the law enforcement team responsible for combatting a digital intellectual property theft campaign involving the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of popular sound recordings valued at more than $6.3 billion. From 2012 to 2015, the website Sharebeast was responsible for over 1 billion illegal downloads of copyrighted works, including pre-release tracks that had not yet been sold to the general public.
The law enforcement team included Kamal Ghali, now a Bondurant attorney and the former Deputy Chief of the Cyber and Intellectual Property Crime Section of the Atlanta U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI agents, and prosecutors from the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta. Attendees of the awards ceremony included U.S. Representative Doug Collins, the FBI Atlanta Field Office’s Special Agent-in-Charge, the First Assistant U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, and RIAA representatives who presented the awards.
The investigation and prosecution reflected a coordinated effort by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia, the Department of Justice Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS), the Office of International Affairs, the FBI’s field offices in Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, and Los Angeles, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, and substantial assistance by the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and the Ministry of Security and Justice in the Netherlands.