Joseph Strange has pleaded guilty to criminal infringement of copyright in the case over unreleased Eminem music that spread online earlier this year, turning a federal accusation into an admission that he sold the songs. The United States Department of Justice announced the plea on the day the Variety article was published, and Strange now faces a maximum of five years in prison.
The plea gives the case its sharpest development yet because Strange had been accused in March 2025 of copyright infringement and interstate transportation of stolen goods after unreleased tracks surfaced online in January 2025. He was 48 when the Department of Justice announced the plea.
Prosecutors say Strange was no stranger to the material he is accused of moving. The original complaint says he worked as a sound engineer for Eminem from 2007 until 2021 at a recording studio in Ferndale, Michigan, giving him access to music that was never meant for public release. Several studio employees alerted the FBI after the tracks appeared online, and agents later identified people who had bought the music.
One of those buyers, Doja Rat, said he paid Strange $50,000 for songs and that Strange claimed to have more than 300 songs and handwritten lyric sheets. The investigation also led to a search of Strange’s residence, where FBI agents seized hard drives containing copies of Eminem’s unreleased music. By November 2025, the songs had been accessed more than eight million times, and investigators estimated the files were worth at least $750,000.
That is what makes the guilty plea so consequential: the case no longer turns only on what investigators found on the drives or who they say bought the files. It now turns on sentencing, and on how a court weighs a former studio employee’s access to unreleased work against the scale of the distribution that followed.
Strange is scheduled to be sentenced on January 27, 2027. The plea closes one chapter of the case, but it leaves the punishment question open — and that is the part that now matters most.
