OiNK’s Bail Date Extended for the 4th Time
Written by Ernesto on June 27, 2008During October 2007, the popular BitTorrent tracker OiNK was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement. Today, the bail date for OiNK admin Alan Ellis has been extended for a fourth time, now until the 28th of July.
Cleveland police initially stated that the charges against Alan would be announced December 2007, but this was soon postponed for two months, only to be postponed again this May. The police did return OiNK’s servers however, but not before they had erased the hard drives.
Today, Alan Ellis was told that his bail date has been extended once gain. Alan told TorrentFreak that the new date has been set for July 28th, an extension of four weeks. As usual, no explanation was given for the delay.
However, the case got a little bit more complicated, after the arrests of six OiNK uploaders in the UK last month. These users, five men and one woman, were arrested under suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, and taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprinting.
In addition, TorrentFreak has received information that an OiNK user from Norway was questioned by the KRIPOS (Norwegian Cybercrime Unit) for his involvement with the BitTorrent tracker. Apart from this single user, there hasn’t been any legal action outside the UK.
At this point, we can only speculate whether the arrests of the users will be used in the case of OiNK admin Alan Ellis, or vice versa. One thing is clear now, the bail date for both Alan and the OiNK users - as we reported yesterday - has been extended till July 28.
With today’s extension, the speculation about potential charges continues. At the moment it remains unclear what evidence the police are trying to find. However, I might assume that they now realize that the initial allegations that the tracker was an organized crime cartel, making hundreds and thousands of pounds, are not true.
Previously: Malaysian Government Orders Torrent Sites Shutdown
Next: Portugal Hands Jail Sentence to First Convicted File-Sharer
43 Responses
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“they now realize that the initial allegations … are not true”
I kind of doubt it.
This is ridiculous… this is like when we had those adverts claiming… Illegal copies of movies being sold on the street helps fund terroist or something…
Lets see what the police can pull out of their asses with the extra month they have…
legally how many times can they extend the date?
As a practicising UK criminal lawyer I’m almost certain that these guys won’t be prosecuted.
Whats happening is an abuse of process designed to strike fear into P2P Bittorrent Users.
They will keep bailing the person as many times as possible. What it needs is a decent solicitor to fight the bail.
Yet again, the copyright lobbies have lied and conspired to get persons prosecuted for crimes they haven’t committed. (Especially in regards to Proceeds of Crime - there were no Profits.)
@1 wtf there not true though.
alan did’nt run some major underground pirate ring making loads of money, i really hope that the police properly investigate this and get to the truth. which is, that alan is not guilty of copyright infringement or running a crime ring making loads of money all he did was make a site so people could share their music, its up to the user if they put copyrighted or none copyrighted content on the site which is not alans problem.
on any point is’nt this a civil case rather than a criminal case?,
@5
What methods and arguments can you use to fight bail?
I second the question from #7.
Also, does anyone think that the bail being extended til the same date means that the police wants to deal with these cases together (maybe somehow merge them into 1 case, to let them mentally harass those innocent people for longer) ?
“Whats happening is an abuse of process designed to strike fear into P2P Bittorrent Users.”
Yeah, we are shaking in our boots… LOL!
When will they learn?
Let’s see how many times is the bail going to be extended.
I’m placing my bet that it will be no case eventually.
I guarantee that these cases will either be dropped or reduced to some charge equivalent to a slap on the wrist.
Wrongful prosecution. Wrongful prosecution. Wrongful prosecution.
@11 - there is no prosecution yet.
@13 - Wrongful imprisonment?
I dont understand. Is it leagal to erase a harddrive on a conficated computer, when they probaly not going to charge them?
@14
Nobody has been imprisoned, either…
Wow, so, when is the release order due??
Still wondering about what US former users will face…
Still wondering about what U.S. former users will face…
@18/19:
Nothing
If I were running a torrent site, I’d be sure to keep offsite backups.
Of course, I’m paranoid enough to keep two nightly, on-site rsync backups of my home computer, I’m considering switching to Dirvish or rdiff-backup to get multi-checkpoint rollback, and since the backup is only 3-4GiB, I’m considering paying rsync.net for offsite storage at some point in the future.
Bail is only for murders,rapists,corporate criminal etc. Allowing people who uploaded stuff onto the internet to have the same rights other criminals have is just not an option.
Who needs trials or laws to hold people, just send them downloaders to gitmo and throw away the keys.
Crystal Ball:
5/17/15:
As Torrenfreak reported yesterday, Alan Ellis’ bail has been extended a 49th time.
@23 - true as as can be. And as people have stated, this is only going to crash, and be buried with the past of the soon-to-be music industry fail.
is Alan needing to pay a lawyer evertime the bail is extended? they could just be trying to drain him of any cash…
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