British Police Confirm Six OiNK Users Arrested
Written by enigmax on June 02, 2008British Police have just confirmed that several users of BitTorrent site OiNK were arrested recently. TorrentFreak broke the news last Friday after sitting on the story for a while but the mainstream press have been holding back over the weekend, waiting for confirmation. Just seconds ago, confirmation came.
Last week TorrentFreak reported that Cleveland Police had arrested a user of OiNK, who was questioned and later released on police bail.
We also discovered that other people had been arrested and deduced from our sources that this police action was taken against alleged pre-release uploaders - those that share before the retail date.
A few minutes ago in an email to TorrentFreak, Cleveland Police confirmed that a total of six individuals were arrested, all in connection with the uploading of pre-release music.
Three of the arrests were made on Friday 23rd May and three more on Wednesday 28th May. The arrested individuals are five men aged between 19 and 33, and a 28-year-old woman.
Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. According to our sources, they were arrested on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry” although this hasn’t yet been confirmed by the police.
We can confirm that at least two of the arrests are for the alleged uploading of a single album. All have been bailed pending further enquiries.
Update: The Register contacted the BPI who gave this statement:
The BPI and IFPI worked with the police in order to close down the OiNK tracker site last October. The illegal online distribution of music, particularly pre-release, is hugely damaging, and as OiNK was the biggest source for pre-releases at the time we moved to shut it down. We provided the information to assist this investigation, but this is now a police matter and we are unable to comment further at this stage.
Previously: OiNK Pre-Releasers Accused of Conspiracy To Defraud Music Industry
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121 Responses
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yikes….
Pre-releasers are the hunted. If people would just wait until the street dates, none of this would be happening.
Yeah, I heard they are solely responsible for the downfall of Brittneys career and made that dude cry again on youtube, I say lynch em.
Yeh… “dude”. Well, it is becoming clear that they are zeroing in on the leaks. Perhaps the other sites should temporarily ban those uploads?
You don’t have to raid trackers in order to bust “prereleasers”.
Early participation in such a release will get you the original releasers’ IP.
Combined with data retention you’ll have the personal information of the ip’s owner at that particular time.
But when users register on trackers with a tracable email address it is much, much easier.
Then you just raid their homes and search their harddrives. Easy done, because “prereleasing a music album” is a crime much worse than murder, rape and such minor offenses …
Difficult to say without hard facts.
anyone else not remember wtf they uploaded ?
I’ll be waiting by window with my six shooter and shotgun! they’ll NEVER TAKE ME BACK!!! NEVER!
Ask them to find the people who robbed your home, and they never even call you back!
but find a bunch of anonymous people on the internet, and they mobilize a task force and give it a name.
Even though Oink members were spread around the world, the reason why the arrests were concentrated in the USA is because those prostitutes in Washington (what we call Senators and Congressman) have been rubberstamping laws written by the movie and music industry - and by the stroke of a pen, a formerly harmless action like filesharing gets turned into a serious felony akin to murder.
strangely enough it’s been that long since oink was taken down I can’t remember my username or password? sorry officers all I know is it was a free to join community site which was basically a music index of what members had on their own computers. Money never changed hands, there were clear labels and tags highlighting the fact that you’re not to download anything if you don’t own the original hard copy or digital rights to the music yourself.
?: you retard, no oink arrests have been made in the US, read the title…
once prereleases have been taken out theyll start on the rest slowly and try and destroy it all, i guess the governments outside the US get the choice to wear lube when doing what corperate US says to do, because no matter what we are going to get screwed anyway in some way, Australia for one has had so many screwed up lawsuits from US Companys trying to claim what they can, example of one i just found http://www.saveouraussieicon.com/email_campaign1.html
This should be a wakeup call to torrent-site admins to revise their procedure for identifying and tracking individual users.
Currently Bittorrent uses IP addresses to identify clients, and so do torrent site admins. A far better and more secure way to identify users is by encrypted userhash (public/private key) like eMule does. That way, users can be positively identified without their IP having to be stored on the server — since the dangerous but widespread practice of IP storage is thereby offering up a windfall of evidence to be used by police to convict members.
When will the Bittorrent and BT site developers get smart and stop using IP addresses for identification?
Good thing NIN didn’t share any of their pre-releases. Who knows maybe the freaking cops would have arrested them as well. This Oink raid is trash.
this is only for UK people right? …right?
“Pre-releasers are the hunted. If people would just wait until the street dates, none of this would be happening”
Wrong. Today this is the excuse that they use. Tomorrow using BT for any activities at all may be illegal. Nobody is safe from prosecution; maybe not today, but someday soon they’ll be coming for you for an offense that doesn’t exist, like “conspiracy to defraud the music industry”. What about “conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer”? Or “conspiracy to spread misinformation” - those are two ‘crimes’ the British police are certainly guilty of…
wow #11 you dont have to be a f**ing troll. fricking D**khead maybe he saw cleveland and thought ohio.
What now, there are women on the Internets uploading musics?
16: Unfortunately is right. If they can whip up some BS excuse charge for pre-releasers, theres nothing stopping them from whipping up a new batch to to stick labels on other people to ‘legally’ take them down as well.
If this ‘conspiracy to defraud the music industry’ charge sticks and works.. they’ll know they have a goldmine of made-up charges at there fingertips and it’ll get ALOT worse.
all companies selling mp3 players, cd players, cd/dvd burning drives, computers, internet services, radios, cell phones with music playing capabilities, and anything else that allows music to be heard should be arrested aswell. im very disappointed in the universe. actually the music industry should be arrested for conspiracy to defraud the musicians, if only the musicians would say something…
what’s next, random searches for mp3 players to see if you DRM’ed your mp3z?
Well i stop buying music since the raid … more people should do that.
I’m only ripping and upping promo’s now
Oh noes! We are soooo scared! Please dont arrest me! :rofl:
F*ng morons could not catch a criminal if he was drunk and in handcuffs.
The only ones whom get get caught are the ones stupid enough to be caught.
Be safe, be anonymous, use virtual servers, never upload from home.
Peace out!
i think we should carefully take a breath and look how this is evolving.
first oh hai we are just after the site that hosts them, then oh hai we are just after the isps, oh hai we are just after the uploaders..whos next?
net neutrality ftw .. if your interested in that(sorry for spam but is it ok since its a noncommerical site?if not remove it) ipower.ning.com there are some youtube videos about them to, search for ipower, or athenewins =)
someone should stop them Now, is this how the internet is eveloping?
stop them now, we are more then they are
Am I the only one a little bit perplexed by what the police are doing with regards to these arrests? The alleged crimes that are being commited are in the digital world, so for what purpose are DNA & fingerprints being taken?
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