Madonna came after her leaker harder than most and now Adi Lederman, the hacker responsible for dropping a significant portion of her Rebel Heart album during late 2014 is now facing a 14-month prison sentence. It took less than a month to track him down, thanks to a joint operation by the FBI and the Israeli Police forces (that's the help you get when you've had eight no. 1 albums).
Lederman was found guilty of computer trespassing, copyright infringement, obstructing investigation and "prohibited secret monitoring." The court documents suggest that the hacker gained access to a cloud computing network and accessed the files of Madonna, manager Guy Oseary and several other affiliates. The investigation also revealed that Lederman had stolen a song from the pop star previously, in 2012, and had sold it rather than leaking it.
The punishment for the crime also includes a fine in the $4,000 range. That seems rather lenient when compared to the sky-high demands made during rare American file-sharing lawsuits...considering that Lederman actually hacked into Madonna's personal information. Then again, he's also spending more than a year behind bars.
Her camp might suggest that the damage has already been done however. The versions of songs leaked by Lederman were low quality, unfinished products, which drove the pop star to release better versions—still incomplete however—of the same tracks. That amounted to more than half of Rebel Heart's tracklist, and Madonna would release the full album several months early.
That said, it's tough to blame Lederman's actions for the disappointing sales of the album. Although Rebel Heart was technically the best-selling album during its first week of release, it still fell behind the Empire soundtrack on the Billboard 200 due to weak streams and single downloads. Despite selling the most actual albums, Rebel Heart was still the worst-performing album in more than two decades for the performer.
