OiNK Down, Norwegian BitTorrent Trackers Next
Written by enigmax on October 24, 2007With the BitTorrent world spinning on its heels after the shock takedown of the huge OiNK tracker, there are now indications that the shutdowns may continue. According to the lawyer who lost against ‘DVD Jon’, next stop is Norway and raids are imminent.
Yesterday, the OiNK BitTorrent tracker was raided and shutdown, not by the MPAA but by real life, bona fide police, working hand in hand with industry association, the IFPI. The war against BitTorrent - usually played out on the civil law arena - has suddenly found itself in the criminal domain. The rules have changed.
With the whole BitTorrent community asking themselves what comes next, a clear indicator has come from a lawyer who works for the industry prosecuting file-sharers:
Norway is next and raids are imminent.
Espen Tøndel is a Norwegian lawyer well known for his legal defeat against ‘DVD Jon‘. He is currently working with the Norwegian branch of the IFPI and MPAA.
Tøndel says the Norwegian police are prepared and ready to carry out raids against Norwegian sites. Everything is in place.
When asked to identify the sites, Tøndel refused to elaborate other than to say that the investigation has been underway for some time and that enough names and evidence has already been gathered to make prosecutions in several cases.
When questioned about the possible fate of Norwegian members of OiNK specifically, nothing further was added other than to stress the close co-operation between British, Dutch and Norwegian police.
Tøndel also speculates on who might be prosecuted if the OiNK database is available to police. His thoughts range from suggesting people who upload and downloaded a lot might be in trouble, right through to ‘random individuals’. Or maybe there is another possibility?
Maybe the police don’t have usable lists.
According to the article, a source has stated that the OiNK membership list was not only encrypted, but also equipped with a ’self-destruct’ type mechanism which relied on a regular signal to continue in ‘OFF’ mode.
Although unconfirmed, this situation would be of some comfort to OiNK’s 180,000 members.
Previously: Why Are The IFPI and BPI Allowed To Hijack OiNK?
Next: P2PKids: Because We Care About Sharing
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“Just a message for all “MediaDefenders” and all the hypocrite mercenaries of the corporations. It is a matter of numbers: you are few, we are millions.”
The RIAA & the MPAA may be few, but the combination of all copyright owners (books, music, movie, software, IP, etc.) is considerable. In addition, many of these companies are owned by giant conglomerates and much of this media is sold through giant retailers (as well as small retailers) and there are millions of shareholders that hold stakes in these companies.
It is romantic to think that a few computer geniuses can forever outsmart all of these people, but in the end, the future of p2p will be decided by legislation, not technology. And that is why the fat cats will win. When Napster first came out, people were saying that the RIAA will be dead in five years. It’s been ten and they are still around (although they are obviously struggling). In five years the RIAA & and MPAA and their cronies will still be around. I will be surprised if the Pirate Bay or any significant tracker is still around. Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material (note: I did not say “stealing”) will be relegated to isolated pockets, just like the home taping days.
“Same occurs with music; if your band is worth it, people will buy the disc and go to their concerts no matter if its available on the net for free”
I wish that this was true, but I disagree. Some people will still buy the CD, but most will simply download it for free, and that will be that.
Culture has been liberated from physical forms and concepts, charging for art and the means to create it in this new world of infinite, freely made copies is more corrupt than anything else.
If an artist’s main concern is payment, their work is more than likely not worth seeing or hearing. Commercial sycophants be damned, this is progress; the resources to propagate art and information have been removed from the hands of those who would make it a commodity unavailable to those who cannot pay.
“If an artist’s main concern is payment, their work is more than likely not worth seeing or hearing.”
Just because someone is willing to do something for free does not mean that they are the best at it.
A lot of good music was written by musicians who were substantially motivated by money. The idea that good musicians are some sort of saintly breed of bohemians who don’t care about money is false. They are no more or less greedy than any other professionals.
“Culture has been liberated from physical forms and concepts, charging for art and the means to create it in this new world of infinite, freely made copies is more corrupt than anything else.”
This is nothing new. It has been possible for some time to inexpensively make copies of other people’s work. Unscrupulous publishers have been bootlegging the work of authors for centuries, at no cost to the original author. They often got busted then. The more things change the more they stay the same.
oinkybank is really rakin in the cash it looks like
oink is going to be able to afford OJ’s lawyer soon
the official oink memorial shirts, stickers and buttons:
http://www.cafepress.com/neverforgetoink
i was in the top 25 up and down loaders at oink and i am so glad it is now off because it was a full time job to share these terabytes. now, at last, i have time to listen to bach, mozart and beethoven full works.
the rest of my backup process of this planet’s music will wait until the copyrights die.
p.s. anyone with a full discography of dave brubeck or other stuff i still don’t have please tell me at chooseit40 at hotmail dot com, your wishes will be my command
free the music or might as well get your cochlea amputated!
Wow. I found a whole motherload of Dave Brubeck right here, DRM free even!
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic/104-0086134-4564756?initialSearch=1&url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&field-keywords=dave+brubeck&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go
“the future of p2p will be decided by legislation, not technology”
Nope. Downloading is illegal in some countries, yet, most people downloading are from THESE countries (ie. USA). So napster went down, it used a central server, located in that country. Now we have decentralized p2p, so they switched going after the peers themselves. Then Anonymous p2p will eventually make that very difficult, so they will try switching to your hardware (DRM, TCA, etc) and yet we will respond with open source free software and hardware, and ways to modify hardware to make it work they way we want and NOT let them control us.
TPB has shown that laws are not the same everywhere, the large corporations would like them to be, just like they are in USA where they throw an unlimited amount of money to make laws to their benefit (not the people). Then they will try to force this with trade agreements, the wipo (wto), etc. But the people will resist, and in some countries politicians do have to listen to their voters; not to mention how bad it looks when USA is discovered involved in internal affairs.
Take a look to Russia, Microsoft wanting to send to jail a School principal for having unauthorized copies of their products; causing the ire of all the russian political spectrum. Now Russia is officially promoting open source free software in schools. Can you see it? The more they mess with the world, the worst it becomes for them.
The large corporations just don’t get it, but its becoming a fight of the people vs them. They think they are teaching a lesson, instead, they lose what little pr the had so fast nobody will care if they ever go bankrupt. In fact i predict many people will celebrate the closure of some major labels. Of course due to capitalism, they will probably shrink from 4 to 3, then to 2 and then to 1 vs the world. Kinda like Microsoft seems to dominate the market today, but will disappear tomorrow.
“Downloading is illegal in some countries”
Sorry to be a nerd, but I don’t think downloading is illegal anywhere. It’s unauthorized distribution that is illegal. You can download anything you want.
I know it seems like the technology will just keep evolving and will be unstoppable, but it will get to a point where it is simply too inconvenient and risky for most people to bother with. There will always be some hard-core fuck-the-system types, but it will be much more scattered and underground.
Once the RIAA gets their heads out of their asses and allows their entire catalogs to be sold DRM-free at a decent bitrate, most people will move in that direction. The RIAA really shot themselves in the foot by embracing DRM to begin with. DRM only discourages people from buying music.
microsoft will not disapear for some time, and is the lesser of two evils, yes, linux is better in most forms, but windows is emensly greater than apple. You can customise millions of things in windows that you can’t on apple. Take photobooth for example, excelent program, but it’s got the same (17?) default picture modes, you cannot get any more, i have tried. There are atleast 10 programs i know for windows that can do this same thing, and they all have more than the apple in versions of pictures you can take. You can also customize these programs (since most of them are opensource) and add your own.
Other than that, yes the industry is losing the war on piracy, and yes, i am glad. Justathought, there are people selling copies of classical music that noone owns the rights to… that’s not right. I can see if i go to a record store and buy an LP or a CD and pay a little cash for it to physically own it, but to pay for a copy.. over the internet! of classical music! with no form of protection laws governing it! imagine that, i could start up my own site as long as i find a bunch of recordings that no one owns the rights to and COPY these, still have them to listen to and sell the copies to people and make a profit. It’s not my work to make a profit off of, but i would feel insulted if someone who bought my copy turned around and started selling copies of their copies, right? what’s to say they are not selling my original file? this is the basis of most idiots i’ve argued with over why piracy is wrong, i’m currently writing a paper on it, i’ll try to post it somewhere it’ll be a great read.
and i really apologize for my spelling errors, grammar fuck ups and syntax redundancies, I’m currently sick and a bit high on Robitussin
Millions of shareholders? So what, its capitalism. Once they see the ship sinking, they will sell their shares and invest in more promising ventures, such as telecommunications (gotta move all that content).
As an investor, it would be very stupid of you to invest on something you know its going down; because a new technology made that business model obsolete. It has happened all the time in history, why would the labels or studios of today get special protection now, and how long you think that protection will hold?
Something tells me, that even with all that rampant uncontrolled content moving on the net, these guys will still remain. Maybe not so many, maybe with less than huge profits; perhaps they will even start making quality films (or God forbid, quality music) instead of just throwing money to variants of the same boring things they consider “safe” to fund. Perhaps with so many going independent they will be forced to soft their draconian contracts, or release their iron grip in the distribution channels, etc. Or they can sink and let more open minded people prosper. Time will tell, but p2p will stay, and prevail.
can you copyright the alphabet or the scales on a musical instrument?
once society got in a glut of media (alphabetical or instrumental note or visual or dna or else sequences) supply, its value and mostly cost, somewhere in the way decreased dramatically. admittedly its unpleasant credit-attributionwise to subgroups owning creation rights, but a satisfying system of timedecayed retribution can be devised to compensate. wonder why not active yet?
downloading many things are illegal in china, haha! aswell though, it seems that to learn through history, we must realize that criminals always find a way, it’s why we’re still around today. Sure, societies of criminals will be erradicated, but stronger and worse criminals will still roam free. Imagine if the trillions of dollars spent each year to stop victimless crimes such as drug use, consumption laws, age restrictions, and piracy were saved. We would have trillions of dollars a year to spend EITHER increasing the effectiveness of various aspects of the economy, or stopping real criminals, both locally, such as murderers, and internationally large criminals, tyrants, who commit genocide, etc. I am currently working (slowly) on a website revolving around the idea of overpunishment to compensate for criminals not caught, PD’s first law of example making. (anyone who is skilled in website making, or wants to donate (non monetarily) in the project including research, beta-testing, and actual programming(since i suck ass at it) are welcome to email me at pimpdoubt@gmail.com) Please feel free to contact me here for any reason, as i’m sure someone is going to send me a “your dumb” email.
i agree with the most recent anonymous. Saying taht Shareholders will protect the industry is very similar to saying that airplanes will never work since there are too many people who have invested in trains.
“Justathought, there are people selling copies of classical music that noone owns the rights to… that’s not right. I can see if i go to a record store and buy an LP or a CD and pay a little cash for it to physically own it, but to pay for a copy.. over the internet! of classical music! with no form of protection laws governing it!”
The music may have been made hundreds of years ago, but those recordings were not. It probably cost serious dough to hire an orchestra and make those recordings. That’s what they are charging for. The music is public domain, but the actual recordings are a separate matter.
You can always record your own version. Hire your own orchestra! They don’t own the music. It’s public domain.
yes, work was done, but creativity was not. Creativity is what needs to be paid for in the music industry, as any art industry.
“Saying taht Shareholders will protect the industry is very similar to saying that airplanes will never work since there are too many people who have invested in trains.”
You have to get away from this idea that it’s just music and movies. Shareholders can’t easily just ignore rampant copyright infringement because a substantial chuck of the economy relies on copyright.
The most likely outcome of all of this is the one proposed by the EFF, where everybody has a fee built-in to their ISP bill and just downloads whatever they want. Musicians sign up to the service and the pool of money gets distributed according to their percentage of downloads. It will be basically be like interactive cable TV and radio combined. Maybe the bittorrent protocol will be used as a the delivery mechanism.
”
I følge kilde som har tipset ITavisen var medlemslistene hos Oink i utgangspunktet kryptert, og i tillegg utstyrt med en selvdestruksjonsmekanisme som gjorde at de ble slettet dersom de ikke innen en viss tid mottok et bestemt signal.”
There you have it.
Self-destruction mechanism.
[quote comment="195165"]”
I følge kilde som har tipset ITavisen var medlemslistene hos Oink i utgangspunktet kryptert, og i tillegg utstyrt med en selvdestruksjonsmekanisme som gjorde at de ble slettet dersom de ikke innen en viss tid mottok et bestemt signal.”
There you have it.
Self-destruction mechanism.[/quote]
Translation?
meh. it’s over. But it was fun for awhile. And I definitely had more money for kickass coffee this year. ;)
When the recording industry offers an alternative that is easier and faster than oink, with music in equal quantity and quality, and at a price befitting copies that cost nothing to create and virtually nothing to distribute, I’ll be first in line.
It’s not going to happen though, the industry is a behemoth with a bunch of vestigial and unrelated smaller divisions writhing in different directions. The best you’ll get is a few labels banding together to offer something half-assed and overly expensive for downloading 160kbps mp3s.
The phrase “recording industry” itself feels like an anachronism, as with digital tools and the propagation of information through the internet, recording an album has become a much more pedestrian undertaking. You can have a professional album recorded and fit for distribution for HUNDREDS of dollars in a studio, or you can make a similar investment and record it yourself, if you’re the DIY type.
The indsutry isn’t much help in distribution now, either. MP3 is the preferred format in this day and age, so it’s not difficult to host a few dozen megabytes on some cheap server and link it to your myspace. Want to charge for your work? Plenty of places will do that for you with no overhead (kunaki, itunes to some extent, cdbaby, snocap etc). The last holdout of the major music corporations are retail stores. Well, fuck ‘em. CDs are inconvenient as it is without driving somewhere, and a good independent record store will stock your CDs anyway, if they’re decent.
The catch is publicity and legitimacy as an artist. What’s the best way to get that? Be good. Be entertaining. Work hard.
[quote comment="195091"]”
It is romantic to think that a few computer geniuses can forever outsmart all of these people, but in the end, the future of p2p will be decided by legislation, not technology.” [/quote]
Thats funny… because technology has been PROVEN to win 100% of the time while legislation only seems to set down rules and regulations that only seem to help the rich guys. Their has been a number of good points in this forum along with plenty of stupid posts. The point of the matter is that you or no one can defeat technology when it is being used against you. Should they find a better way to distribute and fairly price the products that are being sold. Perhaps their would be a better solution to put an end to this war. Unfortunetly the anti-piracy groups feel they need to spend money on arresting and suing their clients then trying to make their clients happy. So… lets thing about this a bit more and continue to throw out some good points.
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