A former employee of Eminem has pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement in the US after stealing and then selling unreleased music recorded by the rapper for around $50,000, resulting in more than 25 tracks being distributed online. He now faces a potential prison sentence of up to five years. 

Joseph Strange worked for Eminem from 2007 to 2021 and, during that time, helped set up and operate a computer system that the rapper used for storing music he had been working on at a studio in Ferndale, Michigan. Strange started making copies of that music for himself, at one point claiming to a potential buyer that he had more than 300 tracks. He then started selling the unreleased Eminem music in 2024.

Commenting on the case yesterday, Assistant Attorney General A Tysen Duva said, “Joseph Strange abused a position of trust to unlawfully copy and sell unreleased music belonging to Eminem, profiting from works that were not yet authorised for public distribution”.

Strange’s conduct, Duva added, undermined Eminem’s “legal and artistic rights”. The criminal division of the US Department Of Justice, he then continued, “remains committed to protecting intellectual property, holding accountable those who seek to profit from theft of creative content, and working with our law enforcement partners to deter and disrupt these crimes”. 

Copyright infringement usually results in civil litigation, where the copyright owner sues the infringer for damages. However, it can also be a criminal matter resulting in fines and prison sentences. 

That usually occurs where the infringement happens on an industrial scale and/or is clearly undertaken for commercial reasons. The key requirement in US copyright law is that the infringer infringes for the “purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. 

The FBI’s Detroit office got involved in this case when the unreleased Eminem tracks started appearing online in January 2025. The feds identified the buyer who said he had paid Strange $50,000 for 25 tracks. Agents then searched Strange’s home and seized hard drivers that contained copies of Eminem’s music. 

Prosecutors said that, while “no commercial release of the music or material” Strange had stolen and sold was “imminent or even certain”, some efforts had been made “to prepare some of the music for possible commercial release, in some cases including studio mastering”. They also claimed that, as of November 2025, the “infringing audio files had been accessed more than 8 million times”. 

Welcoming Strange’s guilty plea, FBI agent Jennifer Runyan said, “Detroit has always been a city where creativity thrives and no one has the right to steal or profit from another artist’s work without their permission. Today’s guilty plea reinforces a simple principle: accountability follows those who compromise the integrity of another person’s creative labour”. 

A legal rep for Strange, Wade Fink, has criticised the official statements from the DoJ and FBI as “hyperbolic” and “self-congratulatory”, insisting that this case is “a far more complicated and nuanced matter than a man just unabashedly stealing”, while adding “Joe Strange is a good man whose children have suffered greatly in all of this”.

“Nevertheless”, Fink said, “my client has taken accountability for what he has done, has tremendous remorse for what has happened to his family, and has great faith, as do I, in the judges of our district to see this case for what it is”. 

Strange is now set to be sentenced in January. 

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