Kevin Cogill of Los Angeles was arrested early in the morning at gun point by five FBI agents last August. He was charged with willfully infringing music copyrights for uploading and streaming nine songs from Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy album via his .

The songs were streamed five months before the album was officially released in November 2008.

Cogill was initially charged in a felony complaint but that charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor after he agreed to help law enforcement identify the source who had given him the unauthorized pre-release copies of the songs. Cogill pleaded guilty to the charge in December in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, where the case is being heard.

In arguing for a six-month sentence for the offense, prosecutors claimed that Cogill's actions had resulted in copyright infringement worth at least US$371,622. Prosecutors said the amount was based on the fact that the songs streamed from Cogill's Web site were later made available for download on sites around the world resulting in potentially tens of thousands of illegal downloads.

Prosecutors pointed to a two hour window of time on June 18 last year during which they said the songs were streamed from Cogill's site before being taken down by the blogger. During the time the songs were streamed more than 1,120 times, they said. Between June and November 2008, the songs streamed from Cogill's site were available for download on more than 1,300 sites, prosecutors claimed.