The cable, dated 17 December 2008, was published by Wikileaks this week and reveals details on a piracy workshop the U.S. Government organized in the country.

In the cable Ambassador Taylor writes that the workshop was paid for by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, which allocated $125,000 to educating Ukrainian authorities on piracy. About 30 local police officers with experience in computer/internet cases were participating .

A topic high on the agenda during the meeting was the fact that many large torrent sites are hosted in Ukraine. Matthew Lamberti of the Department of Justice named the example of Demonoid, a large semi-private BitTorrent tracker that started renting servers in the country early 2008.

“Lamberti noted that earlier this year one of the world’s biggest pirate websites had moved to Ukraine, and that the founder of the site had stated that he was looking for a ‘suitable’ home after being pressured to leave several other countries, including the Netherlands, Canada, and Malaysia. Lamberti cautioned that Ukraine might become a haven for pirate sites if it did not step up enforcement efforts,” the ambassador writes.

However, stopping these sites from renting server space is easier said than done, as Ukrainian authorities don’t have the legal means to do so.

“Representatives have argued that Ukrainian law does not give law enforcement officials clear authority to shut down such websites, although sometimes ISPs can be persuaded to do so,” the ambassador notes.

Aside from these warnings the workshop also explained how private BitTorrent trackers in the U.S. and U.K. were effectively shut down. Kiffa Shirley from the FBI’s Cybercrime Fraud Unit used the example of EliteTorrents, one of the largest BitTorrent communities that was raided during the summer of 2005.

“Shirley gave a detailed briefing on the different kinds of websites that engage in internet piracy and the technology they employ. He also described the investigative steps he and other FBI agents took to investigate elitetorrents.org, a pirate website based in the United States that was known for its extremely fast illegal downloads,” we read in the cable.

Mumith Ali from the music industry funded anti-piracy group IFPI explained how they busted the music oriented BitTorrent tracker OiNK in 2007.

“Ali provided participants with strategies and best practices based on his experiences investigating some of the biggest pirate websites in Europe, including a UK-based private pirate website with 180,000 members notorious for offering illegal downloads of pre-release music albums. Prosecution of the owner of the site is currently pending in English Crown Court,” the ambassador summarizes.

Interestingly enough, it later turned out that one of the main reasons why no torrent admin has been found guilty in the UK is because of IFPI’s involvement. Since the police relied heavily on information provided by industry-funded groups like IFPI, the courts doubted the objectivity of the investigations against both FileSoup and OiNK.

Among other things, the IFPI employee introduced the Ukrainian cyberpolice to several investigative tools they use to spy on BitTorrent communities, including the packer sniffer application Wireshark.

“Moreover, Ali gave a live demonstration of how people download illegal works from pirate websites. Ukrainian participants were particularly interested in Ali’s description of a free computer program called ‘Wireshark’ used by IFPI to investigate pirate sites; we are following up with the Ministry of Interior to provide more information on this program.”

There is no doubt that the 30 computer experts of the Ukrainian police force have learned a lot during the workshop. However, it is doubtful whether the tens of thousands of dollars in U.S. tax payer money will have much of an effect. Apparently, there are bigger problems in the local police force that have to be dealt with first, as the ambassador notes at the end of the cable.

“Unfortunately resource issues will continue to hamper enforcement efforts. For example, several police officers from the regions complained privately that they did not have access to the internet in their workplace,” he writes.

Bummer.

Source: FBI / IFPI Teach How To Bust Private Torrent Sites

Cook and Burrows Bussin successful defended a 17-year-old alleged uploader to the now-defunct music tracker OiNK, and a 56-year-old administrator of the BitTorrent forum, FileSoup.

It was reported in the national media on Tuesday 10th May that Anne Muir, a 58 year old woman in Glasgow has pleaded guilty to criminal file-sharing offences, for which she will be sentenced later this month. Although not a party to that case, I believe that this is a stark reminder of where we are at.

It seems to me that the media consciousness has been diverted by the Digital Economy Act 2010, and all that it entails. The infringement notification procedure and “technical measures” suggested for alleged file-sharers and website blocking has understandably caused great concern. However, the elephant in the room remains s.107 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). This legislation is the source of the ability of the State to prosecute someone in a criminal court for a copyright offence.

It is still possible for a criminal prosecution under CDPA, despite the availability of the civil remedies of which the public are now more than aware. The Digital Economy Act 2010 not only leaves the criminal copyright provisions unchanged, but, in fact, ups the ante. As well as the Crown Court having the power to impose a 10 year custodial sentence and an unlimited fine, the Digital Economy Act now gives the Magistrates Court the power to impose a £50,000 fine. Be under no illusions – people can and will continue to be prosecuted in criminal courts for file-sharing offences.

Reports that the British Phonographic Industry and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry played a major role in the prosecution of Anne Muir are of great concern.

In the recent OiNK case, in which we successfully defended a boy accused of similar file-sharing allegations, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and British Phonographic Industry used their influence to gain entry to our client’s family home, gather evidence and dictate the direction of inquiries. Despite Government ministers categorically stating they do not want to see teenagers arrested in their bedrooms for file-sharing, such assurances are evidently hollow. That prosecution was not only incompetently handled, it was also never in the public interest and the CPS were forced to admit that in March 2010 when they discontinued their case in the face of the rigorous and aggressive defence that we had forwarded.

In February 2011, we had another case before the UK courts. Again, a rights-holder group was heavily involved in the prosecution. The FileSoup prosecution was aimed at the peer-to-peer distribution of films, so the Federation Against Copyright Theft was the relevant body. Again, we mounted a robust defence and, again, the CPS dropped the case, offering no evidence and allowing our client to be formally acquitted by the Crown Court Judge.

It is of concern that our clients in the OiNK and FileSoup cases were members of the public whose alleged criminality appeared extremely limited. In OiNK, it was alleged that our client had found the music on one publicly accessible music site and simply moved it onto a members-only site (OiNK). In FileSoup, the prosecution was initially focused on a film (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) for which they had already prosecuted the person responsible for the real criminality in this case – the original leaker. That film was then circulated on the internet for a considerable period of time and its distribution was widespread. FACT then took the decision to prosecute a non-profit making community forum of film buffs. This FileSoup prosecution was clearly not directed at the person responsible for any loss or to blame for any leaks.

The OiNK and FileSoup investigations were carried out almost entirely by the rights-holder groups, who then gave the police and CPS the evidence they sought to rely upon, in order to prosecute. However, the duty is on the police and the prosecuting authority to independently investigate alleged offences. It appears that they simply did not do so in those cases. The only people who had investigated were the rights-holder groups, who are not independent bodies. FACT, BPI and IFPI are funded by the media industries and it was they who controlled the OiNK and FileSoup investigations. Little or nothing independent was carried out by the police. The role of the rights-holder groups became effectively that of investigators, witnesses and experts in their own case.

These internet sites are evidently, in the view of the rights-holders, encouraging breaches of copyright. While there is no doubt that a copyright holder is entitled to the protection of the law, it is nevertheless fundamental that a prosecution is conducted impartially and independently. This was not our experience in the OiNK and FileSoup cases.

I only know about the case of Anne Muir from the media reports that have been published. However, I am willing to bet that the rights-holder groups have acted in a similar way in the prosecution of Muir.

It was our view that the rights-holder groups target the people with the least chance of resisting a prosecution of this nature; those having made no commercial gain and often with little funds to defend such a case. They have prosecuted the very people who spend significant amounts of their time and money in pursuing their interests in music and film. It certainly appears that rights-holder groups are avoiding taking on those with funds at their disposal, perhaps for fear of them exposing the manner in the way in which these groups go about such investigations. It was only through a methodical and painstaking consideration of the evidence that we were able to draw the attention of the Court to the investigative failures and flawed evidence in the OiNK and FileSoup cases.

It is reported that Anne Muir was not a leaker or a site administrator, but a simple file-sharer on the Direct Connect client. She therefore appears to be an unremarkable file-sharer – part of a class of people that must include the vast majority of UK citizens between the ages of 14 and 30. This legislation and series of cases seek to criminalise a large proportion of the youth of this country.

The inequality in real terms is substantial. FACT, BPI and IFPI wield enormous financial resources and clout. They clearly do lobby Parliament and pressure prosecutors to take cases on their behalf. FileSoup and OiNK operated as forums for people with an interest in films and music and were not commercial or profit making organisations. Anne Muir was not alleged to have made any money from her file-sharing activities.

FileSoup, OiNK and the prosecution of Muir were directed at people who are considered in the most vulnerable groups of society. Our OiNK client was a 17 year old boy. Our client in FileSoup was, due to illness, largely housebound in his flat in Scotland. Anne Muir is reported to have suffered mental health problems.

These are the people who the mighty US film and music industries choose to pursue.

The frustrating part is that it falls to the British tax payer to fund these prosecutions. The defence funding, also borne by the British tax payer, is based on a page count of disclosed material controlled by these rights-holders groups. In the OiNK and FileSoup cases, the funding we were able to receive was inadequate to cover the costs that we had incurred in defending the prosecutions. These are the conditions in which alleged file-sharers are supposed to defend against the limitless resources of the US media industries.

As news of Anne Muir’s conviction washes over an indifferent British public, the repercussions may eventually be felt as the rights-holder groups become more buoyant by their successes in Court and through their lobbying. With vast proportions of the UK public involved in file-sharing to some degree, who will be next?

David Cook is a solicitor from Burrows Bussin Solicitors in Manchester.

Source: Scottish File-Sharing Conviction Dismays OiNK and FileSoup Lawyer

After years of operating the site without any noticeable trouble, in the summer of 2009 police and the Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) conducted a raid on the home address of the site’s owner, known online as ‘TheGeeker’. Another raid was carried out around the same time on the property of fellow administrator ‘Snookered’. Both were arrested and taken in for questioning.

In the summer of 2010 the two administrators were charged with conspiracy to infringe copyright for their involvement with the site. As in previous cases in the UK, the evidence was solely gathered by the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group FACT. No independent investigation was carried out by the police.

This critical lack of investigation on the prosecution’s part was brought to the Court’s attention by the solicitors of the two administrators. The solicitors, who successfully defended the owner of BitTorrent tracker OiNK in an earlier trial, pushed the prosecutor to formulate their charges. This turned out to be problematic.

The prosecution failed to understand some of the technical issues, did not know whether to prosecute FileSoup as a business or not, and was unsure whether the copyright holder had caused prejudice. Since there was no independent investigation into the case, all these questions remained unanswered.

Today the Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop the case entirely. It concluded that the alleged offenses are a civil rather than a criminal matter and decided not to spend any more public money on the prosecution. As a result, ‘TheGeeker’ and ‘Snookered’ are free to go.

Both men are relieved that the case has finally come to an end, and are grateful for the excellent work their solicitors carried out.

“It has been a long and stressful 18 months but I am happy to finally have the weight lifted from me,” Snookered told TorrentFreak. “During this time my solicitors, Burrows Bussin and David Cook in particular have kept me sane. Nothing was too much for them. I owe them a debt of gratitude along with my Barrister Ian Whitehurst.”

“I hope to have some more details in the next few days so I may say more then. Thank you to everyone for all the support. It was greatly appreciated,” he added.

Morgan Rose solicitors, who defended TheGeeker, are now able to add another win in a prominent BitTorrent case to their resume, which is welcomed by other UK-based operators of file-sharing sites.

“This case is not a one-off,” David Cook, Snookered’s solicitor said in a comment. “We have now seen two prosecutions for allegations such as these, both of which were fundamentally flawed. We have persistently worked in exposing the flaws in these cases, which have resulted in the absolute failure of both prosecutions.”

Today’s news is a great blow to the UK anti-piracy outfit FACT, who have spent tens of thousands of pounds on this case alone. According to the prosecution FACT’s involvement created a great inequality. The movie industry funded group has enormous financial resources while the defendants only ran a non-profit website.

Yet again the prosecution was led by FACT to believe that they were dealing with a criminal gang, a picture that didn’t hold up on closer inspection. Luckily for the UK tax payer and the FileSoup admins, the Court realized in time that justice was best served by dropping the case.

Source: Court Drops FileSoup BitTorrent Case, Administrators Walk Free

“Operation Ark Royal”, as the investigation into OiNK was named, also resulted in the arrests of five users of the BitTorrent tracker.

Previously, four users pleaded guilty to uploading music torrents. The four were charged with copyright infringement and sentenced to fines and community service, rather than the custodial sentences the prosecution had been pushing for.

This week the last OiNK case came to an end, as the remaining uploader Matthew Wyatt saw his case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Unlike earlier press releases from the music industry alleged, Wyatt was not the original source of the music files he made available. The prosecution had further difficulties providing evidence and never actually proved that the files Wyatt linked to were actually copyrighted.

Wyatt’s lawyer David Cook said that the music industry pushed for a criminal instead of a civil case just to set an example, which failed miserably. The Prosecution Service was acting as a proxy for the music industry and in doing so it failed to come up with solid evidence.

“Government ministers have categorically stated they do not want to see teenagers arrested in their bedrooms for file-sharing. This case makes clear such assurances are hollow. This prosecution was not only incompetently handled, it has never been in the public interest and the CPS was forced to admit that,” Cook commented.

A week from now the UK Government is expected to rush the new anti-piracy bill through Parliament, in part thanks to an aggressive lobby from the same music industry groups that pushed OiNK over. Critics of the bill are planning to run ads to convince MPs not to accept it and have already raised over £10,000 in just three hours.

If anything, the outcome of the OiNK investigation which cost tax payers hundreds of thousands of pounds should motivate legislators to think twice before they accept the Bill.

Source: Fifth OiNK Uploader Walks Free

The jury at Teesside Crown Court took just a couple of hours to return a unanimous verdict of “Not Guilty” – Ellis walked away a free man.

Ellis kept a low profile as he left court, refusing to comment to waiting reporters. The recording industry, fronted by the BPI, didn’t hide their feelings.

“This is a hugely disappointing verdict which is out of line with decisions made in similar cases around the world,” the group said in a statement.

“The defendant made nearly £200,000 by exploiting other people’s work without permission. The case shows that artists and music companies need better protection.”

Behind the scenes, some observers felt that while this defeat for the music industry was welcome, there were still concerns that things wouldn’t end with Ellis’s acquittal. And they appear to have been right.

Speaking at a press conference to launch the annual Digital Music Report, IFPI spokesman John Kennedy said that the ‘not guilty’ verdict was not the end of the road. The recording industry would “find other ways” to punish Ellis, and is now seriously considering taking action against him through the civil courts.

Kennedy said there is a commitment by the industry to retrieve the money the users of OiNK donated to the site, and give it to the artists whose music was shared there.

He also attacked the decision to charge Ellis with fraud instead of copyright infringement, and criticized UK legislation for being out of date.

Ellis confirmed earlier that his acquittal did not mean that OiNK was set for a revival. “Absolutely not,” he said, while adding that he would just like to get on with his life now.

It seems that IFPI have other plans.

Source: Music Industry Set For Civil Action Against OiNK

Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.

“21 million downloads. 600,000-plus albums. £300,000. This was a cash cow, it was perfectly designed to profit him and it was as dishonest as the day is long,” said Makepeace.

It is common sense to come to the conclusion that Oink was dishonest, claimed the prosecution lawyer, adding that Ellis knows that it’s dishonest “to promote, encourage and facilitate criminal activity,” and accusing him of telling the jury “persistent, cunning, calculated lies.”

It would, of course, be dishonest to promote “criminal activity”, but Mr Makepeace should be very well aware that the activity engaged in by OiNK’s users is covered under civil law.

Switching momentarily from criticism to praise and then back again, Makepeace said that the OiNK website was a “wonderful machine” for sharing music but noted that while the site had a really good brand name, it was a brand synonymous with “ripping off music.”

University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales. Mr Makepeace trashed her evidence.

“It’s nonsense, it’s flannel, it’s verbiage, it’s garbage,” he told the Court.

For the defense, Alex Stein said that Ellis had never knowingly acted dishonestly and that in 2004 when OiNK was launched, it was a “brave new world” on the Internet.

“In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.

The media organization being referred to by Stein was the IFPI, who he said had never requested that OiNK be shut down, and had instead “sat and watched.”

Gazette Live reports that Stein went on to launch a scathing attack on the IFPI.

“They used this site. Their own members used this site to promote their own music and now they’re crushing him. Maybe he grew too big for them, maybe they’ve taken a different marketing approach. I don’t know. But it was decided that this site should be taken down.

“All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody’s acting dishonestly it’s them,” he said.

At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.

The verdict cannot be appealed and Ellis can finally put the past behind him and move on.

Breaking story…

Source: OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty, Walks Free

Yesterday Ellis stated that he had initially hosted the tracker in his bedroom while studying at Teesside University, and used the coding experience to develop his skills in order to bring future employment possibilities.

Today more details became available, which appear to show that Ellis believed that he operated his site within the law.

While it’s impossible to say what goes on inside another person’s head, when it comes to the law the average BitTorrent site admin or keen BitTorrent user will be mostly tuned into the requirements of copyright and violations of copyright law. In basic terms relating to this case, the unauthorized copying and/or distribution of copyright works, both illegal under UK copyright law.

BitTorrent trackers such as OiNK do not distribute, store or duplicate copyright works, so when Ellis said yesterday that he viewed what he did as similar to how the post office or telephone company operates, i.e directing other people’s data (illegal or not), he clearly believes that type of operation is permissible under copyright law. Indeed, unlike in other jurisdictions, there is no offense of ‘facilitation’ under UK copyright law.

“I didn’t think the site was abusing the copyrights,” he said, and in the above context he was right. But if OiNK wasn’t abusing copyrights, that responsibility must fall elsewhere – at the feet of the site’s members.

“If these people chose to download music and in doing so were breaking the law, then that was their responsibility, not mine,” Ellis told the Court. “I never saw that I was responsible for them downloading music.”

While Ellis can’t be held responsible for what others do on his site, he was candid when it came to admitting that he made use of some of the material indexed by the tracker. Ellis told the Court that he spent a lot of money buying music, but had used file-sharing as a mechanism to discover new artists.

“From my experience if I download music and I like it, I would go out and buy it. I understood most people to have that view,” he explained.

According to Gazette Live, Ellis also told the Court that he responded “out of good will” to takedown requests received from the infamous Web Sheriff anti-piracy company on behalf of rights holders.

So, if OiNK didn’t break copyright law by not transferring, copying or storing copyright works, and there is no offense of facilitation of the same under UK law, why was the site shut down and why is this trial taking place?

Maybe because the BPI and IFPI knew that copyright infringement charges wouldn’t stick, they instead guided the police down another route, that of Conspiracy to Defraud.

Ellis denies that charge and the case continues.

Source: OiNK Admin: Pink Palace Never Abused Copyrights

From the very beginning, the music industry has pictured the site’s founder as someone who charges users for access to the site, claiming that it was set up to make profits from infringing on the rights of the major record labels.

Its users were criminals who conspired to steal from the music industry for reasons other than the enjoyment of music, music industry groups claimed. “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure,” Jeremy Banks of the IFPI said shortly after the site fell, insinuating that profits were made behind the scenes.

Last week the prosecution in the OiNK trial continued down the same path, pointing out that Ellis had gathered nearly $300,000 from voluntary donations over the years. They made it seem like Ellis was running a profitable business but failed to mention that a large chunk of this money was continuously invested back into the site and its running costs.

No proof was provided that Ellis used any of the donation money to enrich himself. He had the equivalent of $32,500 in several savings accounts at the time of his arrest. Ellis planned to use this money to buy servers for the tracker.

This week Ellis has the chance to start telling the Court his side of the story, and has been detailing how he initially hosted the tracker in his own bedroom when he was studying at Teesside University.

Ellis explained how OiNK began as a pet project with the sole purpose of improving his “outdated” UK honours degree in software engineering. “I didn’t have an intention, I was furthering my skills as a programmer, as a software engineer,” Ellis told Teesside Crown Court today.

Ellis, who was working on the backend of the site to make sure that everything kept running, was merely providing a platform for OiNK’s users to share whatever they wanted. He denied the charges of conspiracy to defraud the music industry.

The case continues.

Source: OiNK Was Started to Improve Ellis’s Programming Skills

The jurors were further warned by Judge Briggs not to Google for OiNK or do any other form of research on the Internet. This might be a good suggestion, as many of the mainstream press reports thus far have been littered with inaccuracies.

Even the BBC report the site was free to join, but in the very next sentence say it cost £5. In another article they report it cost $5.

“It would be most unfortunate if any of you did any private research on the internet relating to this matter. Please don’t,” said Briggs. “It’s only likely to cause difficulties and could in theory abort the trial. So, ladies and gentlemen, no independent research.”

Judge Briggs told the jurors that the defendant, OiNK admin Alan Ellis, is charged with an offence of conspiracy to defraud.

“Put very simply it is suggested he was involved in a website that was used to distribute sound recordings and things of that nature in breach of copyright,” he said.

Ellis denies the charge that he “conspired with others unknown” to defraud the music industry.

Today the trial continued and the jury was told by the prosecution that the OiNK tracker facilitated 21 million downloads. Ellis, who accepted donations from members, had gathered almost $300,000 (£190,000) in several PayPal accounts over the years, money that allegedly came from donations.

“Every penny was going to Mr Ellis,” said Peter Makepeace, prosecuting. “He hadn’t sung a note, he hadn’t played an instrument, he hadn’t produced anything. The money was not going to the people it rightly belonged to, it was going to Mr Ellis.”

The prosecution failed to mention that the money was used by Ellis to pay for the servers and hosting, which probably cost him several thousand dollars a month.

The court was further told how OiNK did not host or distribute any music itself, but instead indexed files shared by its users for others to download.

When responding to a description of how BitTorrent works, that leechers share what they download with other peers, thus speeding up downloads, Mr Makepeace commented: “That is the beauty of the Oink website. It never had to upload any music itself, all it did was provide the facility of linking one person to another who wanted that music.”

After his arrest, the prosecution said that Ellis told officers: “All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.”

The case continues.

Source: OiNK Admin Received Nearly $300k in Donations

The private site tracked hundreds and thousands of torrents linking to the finest recordings from virtually every musical genre. With millions of peers, it was more popular than many public trackers.

The site was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement in October 2007, based on intel provided by two music industry lobby organizations, the IFPI and the BPI. The police arrested Alan Ellis, the founder of the site, and months later several uploaders were arrested as well.

Four of the uploaders pleaded guilty at Teesside Crown Court in December 2008, where they were all charged with copyright infringement offenses. The four were later sentenced to community service and fines.

The trial of OiNK founder Alan Ellis was pushed back and started today at Middlesbrough Crown Court. Due to a press boycott of the previous court hearings, there was no information available on the reasons for the delay.

What we do know is that Ellis has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the music industry for his role in the OiNK tracker.

During the first day of his trial little has happened. The case has been adjourned until tomorrow when the jury will be assigned. There is still a reporting ban in place on three specific issues, but the trial can and will be reported on.

We will cover the rest of the trial, which is expected to end next week, in the coming days.

Update: Court documents list the remaining uploader as part of the trial, but new information received by TorrentFreak says that his case is due later this year.

Source: Trial Against OiNK Admin Alan Ellis Begins

The individuals were charged with copyright infringement and sentenced to fines and community service, rather than custodial sentences the prosecution had been pushing for.

Steven Diprose was sentenced to 180 hours community service, and ordered to pay £378 in Court costs. Michael Myers was told to pay a £500 fine. Mark Tugwell has to undertake 100 hours community service and pay £378 Court costs. The fourth uploader, James Garner was sentenced to 50 hours community service and also has to pay £378 Court costs.

What remains are the cases against one other uploader and Alan Ellis, the administrator of OiNK. Unlike other file-sharing related cases, the charges against Ellis are not related to copyright offenses. Instead, he has been charged with “conspiracy to defraud”.

Ellis’ case was scheduled to be heard today at the Teesside Crown Court, but the session didn’t last long as the trial was postponed till January 2010. Due to the press blackout, TorrentFreak was unable to find out whether a reason has been given for the delay.

The OiNK shutdown was an international operation. Codenamed “Operation Ark Royal”, it involved co-ordinated action by both British and Dutch police forces. IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations, allegedly assisted in gathering the ‘evidence’ that led to the arrests.

The tracker – which served some 180,000 users including NiN frontman Trent Reznor – was shut down but several replacements took over including Waffles.fm and What.cd. The latter developed a community of nearly 100,000 members and recently celebrated the upload of the 500,000th torrent.

Source: Trial of OiNK BitTorrent Site Admin Delayed Until 2010

Site administrator Alan Ellis was arrested immediately and eventually charged with conspiracy to defraud. Five others, who were arrested months later, were accused of uploading music to others via the site.

Four of the uploaders plead guilty at Teesside Crown Court last December, where they were all charged with copyright infringement offenses. The four have now been sentenced.

Steven Diprose was sentenced to 180 hours community service, and has to pay £378 in Court costs. Michael Myers was ordered to pay a £500 fine. Mark Tugwell has to undertake 100 hours community service and has to pay £378 Court costs. The fourth uploader, James Garner was sentenced to 50 hours community service and also has to pay £378 Court costs.

For one other uploader and OiNK admin Allan Ellis the wait continues. Their cases have been adjourned and they will appear before court in March.

A source close to one of the convicted uploaders told TorrentFreak in a response: “[The Judge] swallowed the prosecution line completely that initial seeders were causing major damage to the copyright holders, and particularly uploaders who uploaded before the official release date. The fact that all the early uploads were only 1 or 2 days early and that 3 out 4 of the uploaders bought their CDs online did not sway him. All the retailers, quite naturally, denied this.”

We were further told that, if the defendants had not had such good references and strong legal representation, the Judge would have seriously considered a custodial sentence. This ruling, the first of its kind in the UK, will most certainly be used as a precedent for future cases.

Developing story, more info will be added later.

Source: OiNK Uploaders Sentenced to Community Service

Site administrator Alan Ellis, 25, was arrested immediately and eventually charged with conspiracy to defraud.

Five others, who were arrested months later, were accused of uploading music to others via the site. They were charged with copyright infringement offenses.

Yesterday, all six appeared at Teesside Crown Court in the UK. Ellis faced a charge of conspiracy to defraud, while the others – Steven Diprose, 21, from Staines, London, James Garner, 19, from Winsford, Cheshire, Michael Myers, 34, of Brough in North Humberside, Mark Tugwell, 19, from Caister near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk and Matthew Wyatt, 19, a student in London but originally from Stamford, Lincolnshire – all faced charges of copyright infringement.

Ellis did not enter a plea, and his case has been adjourned until 23 March 2009. The five uploaders entered pleas, and their hearing will continue at a later stage. All five uploaders were accused of making music albums available on OiNK, and according to insider information, at least four of them pleaded guilty.

Source: OiNK Admin and Uploaders Appear in Court

During October 2007, Operation Ark Royal achieved its aims. OiNK was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement, followed by a number of arrests carried out by Cleveland police over the next few months. Site administrator Alan Ellis was eventually charged with Conspiracy to Defraud, while five other users who uploaded just a single album each were charged with Copyright Infringement. One of them earlier told TorrentFreak “I think it’s a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.”

This morning at 09:45 they appeared before Teeside magistrates. The case of Alan Ellis was, as expected, passed on to the Crown Court. Interestingly, one of the five uploaders has to appear at the Crown Court as well, while the other four will reappear before Magistrates Court. These next hearings are set at October 2nd. [updated, 4pm GMT]

In any event, those accused will be confronted with evidence gathered by Cleveland police, who have found themselves surrounded in their own copyright controversy. A little while ago we reported on the reluctance of certain police forces in the UK to buy an appropriate license from the music industry to allow them to listen to radios or other music on their premises. Put bluntly, this means that police forces in the UK without a license, are themselves copyright infringers. At the time we joked that it would be highly inappropriate for Cleveland police to get involved. Seems like it’s too late.

According to GazetteLive, Cleveland police have not bought a license from the Performing Rights Society (PRS). So, while they continue to play music on their premises, they are actually breaking the law.

Deputy Chief Constable Derek Bonnard, sounding very much like he doesn’t want to pay said: “We continue to assess the position and are seeking advice to determine if we are required by law to spend a significant amount of public money, which we consider is better committed to crime fighting, than in this way.”

Hear, hear Mr Bonnard, I agree with you completely. Hopefully the magistrates in Teeside today consider the amount of money spent bringing the OiNK six to court, and come to the conclusion that in this case too, public money is better spent elsewhere, rather than on the interests of the music industry.

Source: OiNK Six Appear in Court, Faced By Pirating Police

However, the thought of Miss Isabella Barwinska picking up a £16,000 bill from the civil courts recently for sharing one £10 game is outrageous too, but maybe even more so. Miss Barwinska didn’t turn up or defend her case, no-one seems to know why, but for a lot of people facing similar actions, the prospect of facing a legal system they don’t understand and can’t afford to participate in, financial issues are at the forefront of doing nothing about the threatening letters.

These people simply cannot defend themselves and this is why it might make sense to criminalize personal-use file-sharing. In a criminal case if you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you by the state and you get the benefit of proper justice at least, a right of reply within a proper structure, not grubby threatening letters designed to wear people down.

I’ll let you into a little secret. When people say file-sharing is “as bad as shoplifting”, in the UK that comparison is pretty ridiculous. Many shoplifters are let off with a simple caution and even the most persistent would have to be uniquely unlucky to get fined £6,000 (plus £10,000 costs) for a £10 game. If Miss Barwinska had been caught physically stealing it, a police caution would be likely, or perhaps a very small fine. In the ‘real-world’ she’d need to smash through the storefront with a truck to end up with a fine the size of the one she got.

The other reason why there might be benefits in bringing file-sharing out of the civil domain and into the criminal is because even fairly large-scale commercial piracy on and off the Internet is treated with extreme leniency in the UK.

Last week we reported that the UK’s Hull city council said it had such a massive piracy problem at its biggest market in Walton Street, it had to ban legitimate traders too in order to stamp it out. Well, it seems that a part of this ‘problem’ was one Robert Guiness.

Mr Guiness had been using the Internet to download movies, music and computer games which he then burned onto DVD and CD and sold them at Walton Street market. When the police searched his van and raided his house, they found over 10,000 pirate movies, more than 600 audio CDs, a couple of hundred DVDs filled with MP3s and 283 computer games. He was a commercial pirate and his long-term considered actions certainly contrast nicely with Miss Barwinska’s civil tort involving a £10 game uploaded for one second.

So, taking Miss Barwinska’s punishment as a guide, presumably Mr Guiness should enjoy a minimum fine of 283 games at £6,000 each? Plus the movies and music. Oh boy, Mr Guiness would be in some big kind of trouble if Davenport Lyons had got to him first. Luckily for him, he got arrested by the police instead and had the good fortune of having a criminal trial.

Due to the “exceptional circumstances” in the case (“i’m but a small cog in a big machine guv’nor”), he was given a suspended sentence and walked out of the court a free man. No fine.

Just to be clear, I don’t really want file-sharing criminalized and I certainly don’t want the UK courts jammed full of petty file-sharing cases. For their part, the police don’t even have time to come to household burglaries or car thefts, so we could never waste their time on non-profit file-sharing issues. However, I wonder how many of the UK’s ‘pinball pirates’ would wish they could be labeled a criminal in order to be excused a massive fine, picking up a criminal record in the process but walking away a free person instead? Desperate people will do desperate things – people have committed suicide over smaller debts than this. No-one in financial difficulty should ever have to aspire to criminal status in order to mount a defense, or aspire to a criminal conviction like that of Mr Guiness, in order to be treated with leniency.

But hold on just one moment. What about the OiNK users that are currently the subject of police criminal action for uploading ONE album each. Has petty file-sharing already become a criminal offense? The Crown Prosecution Service seems to think so.

In a country like Britain, which prides itself on its sense of justice and fairness, it can’t be right to have such a huge imbalance in the legal system, where an ordinary single mother of two making a single mistake is treated more harshly than a for-profit criminal like Mr Guiness. Equally, how can one set of file-sharers be the subject of a simple ISP ‘warning letter‘, another pick up a £16,000 bill and others get hauled off to the police station for interrogation, fingerprinting, DNA sampling and subsequent trial, for the same offenses?

It’s crystal clear – to the man in the street the legal system to deal with file-sharing right now in the UK seems just about as clear as mud and maybe, just maybe, it’s time for the government to step and decide once and for all. Should file-sharers be warned, bankrupted or jailed? Don’t forget Mr Brown, there are an estimated 6 million of them. Choose wisely.

Source: Is it Time To Make File-Sharing a Criminal Offense?

Two months later, two of the six alleged uploaders were released from further investigation, but (at least) two of the remaining four have been charged today. The alleged uploaders were charged with copyright infringement for uploading one CD. The “conspiracy to defraud” accusations vanished, as they were not mentioned.

The case(s) will be heard in two weeks at a Magistrates Court, after which there is a possibility that it will be passed onto a Crown court. TorrentFreak had the chance to talk to one of the charged uploaders. “I think it’s a sledgehammer to crack a walnut,” he said. The alleged uploader is convinced that he is being used to set an example.

It is indeed strange that thousands of UK residents get off with a friendly warning letter from their ISP, while the four OiNK uploaders are being charged for doing exactly the same thing. The fact that it is only one CD makes the case even more bizarre.

OiNK was one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers, hosting hundreds and thousands of torrents. The site was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement in October 2007, based on intel from the IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations.

The police have yet to release an official statement, so more details about the charges may come available in the coming days. Until then, the BPI told us they can not comment on the case.

Early report, more information might be added

Source: OiNK Uploaders Charged with Copyright Infringement

Cleveland police initially stated that the charges against Alan would be announced during December 2007, but this was soon postponed for two months due to a lack of evidence, only to be postponed another 4 times.

Interestingly, the charges against Ellis are not related to copyright offenses. Instead, he has been charged with “conspiracy to defraud”, further details about the charges are not available at the moment, but are likely to be released in the coming days. On 24th September, the case will he heard at a magistrates court.

Later today there will be more news regarding the charges (if there are any) against the four OiNK uploaders. Initially, six uploaders were arrested on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, and other copyright offenses. However, two uploaders were released from further investigation in July.

The OiNK shutdown was an international operation, named “Operation Ark Royal”, and both British and Dutch police were involved. The police acted upon information fed to them by the IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations who claimed that OiNK was a money machine.

Update: Uploaders are charged.

Source: OiNK Admin Charged With Conspiracy to Defraud

There is some good news though, as two of the six – a 19 year old man and a 28 year old women – wont face any further charges, and now go free. For the other four, and Alan Ellis himself, the wait continues. Alan told TorrentFreak that his new bail date is set for September 10th.

Thus far, the police have not replied to our inquiries so it remains unclear why two of the six uploaders have been released from any charges. The uploaders were arrested by detectives involved with ‘Operation Ark Royal’ this May, on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry” and other copyright offenses. No further arrests have been made since then.

OiNK was one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers, hosting hundreds and thousands of torrents. The site was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement in October 2007, based on inaccurate intel from the IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations.

Source: Two OiNK Uploaders Go Free

Cleveland police, having originally stated that the charges against Alan would be revealed December 2007, extended the bail for another for two months, only to extend it again until May and then again until the end of June.

When they still weren’t ready to charge anyone by this date, they extended bail again until July 28th 2008. However, today, the police have extended the date again for Alan, and the other six arrested in connection with the case.

The six who were arrested, five men aged between 19 and 33, and a 28-year-old woman, were done so on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, and other copyright offenses.

Repeated in the mainstream press such as the BBC, these allegations of serious fraud take on a really sinister tone, but the reality is somewhat different. At most these individuals did what an estimated 6 million others do in the UK on a regular basis – they simply shared files. None of the six are accused of anything more than offenses linked to the uploading of a single album each, yet today they will report again to the police, their lives on hold.

Elsewhere today in the UK, will be the characteristic sound of letters dropping through the front door onto the mat. Some people will be getting bills, others direct mail and junk. Some will be getting well wishes on a happy occasion. Others will be opening an unexpected letter from their ISP which claims they have been caught uploading music by the BPI, that they’ve been very naughty and shouldn’t do it again.

After long negotiations between the music industry and ISPs, along with a considerable amount of government ‘encouragement‘, sending out educational letters was considered a proportionate response to the ‘problem’ of file-sharing. Even the disconnection of uploaders was considered draconian, and there is certainly no suggestion of police involvement.

Shouldn’t the six OiNK uploaders be getting a “friendly” letter and a slap on the wrist too?

Source: Where’s the Warning Letter for the OiNK Uploaders?

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.

Source: OiNK’s Bail Date Extended for the 4th Time

Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Sources close to those arrested confirm that most accusations relate to the uploading of a single album by each suspect but despite the fact that uploading music is not a crime in the UK if done for no profit, somehow this civil issue had been transformed into allegations of serious crime, with police paying close attention to donations the suspects made to the site, presumably in an effort to find some financial motive.

Rather than the organized crime ring, they were told to expect, the police ended up questioning six regular people, terrified and mortified at being in trouble with the police for the first time in their lives. Eventually all six were released, and bailed to report back to police on July 1st. Alan Ellis himself is due to report on the same date, after his bail was extended not just once, but three times already.

Sources close to case have informed TorrentFreak that those arrested will report to the police next Tuesday and told that their bail will be extended. They will be ordered to reappear before police on Monday 28th July. No reason will be given for the delay in either releasing or charging those accused, but it is likely to increase speculation that the evidence in the case isn’t anywhere near as strong or as damning as the police were led to expect.

Source: Arrested OiNK Uploaders’ Bail to be Extended

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.

Source: British Police Confirm Six OiNK Users Arrested

It seems the music industry’s desire to paint OiNK as a criminal network focused on the ruination of the music business, has so far led them to direct the police into arresting users who allegedly pre-released albums, i.e shared albums before their stated retail release date. As mentioned in our previous article, there are no laws in the UK which give extra gravity to pre-release cases, but the music industry seems keen to portray this type of copyright infringement as being much more serious. It has been their theme since the day of the original raid and shutdown of OiNK.

Many observers have been questioning for some time now why the police are involved in this case when it’s believed users of the site committed only civilly actionable offenses at best. It’s clear that simple copyright infringement isn’t what the music industry has in mind.

Those accused were visited by detectives involved with ‘Operation Ark Royal’, sometimes accompanied by local police. After identification, they were arrested under suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, told that they were not alone and that police would be arresting and interviewing more people in connection with the case. Suspects were then taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprinting.

During their interview the suspects were asked all about OiNK, their understanding of the purpose of the site and what they did as a user there. The police were also keen to discover if these alleged pre-releasers personally knew OiNK admin, Alan Ellis, which of course – like the majority of OiNK members – they didn’t.

The police have been asking the suspects for their account details on OiNK. The police are in possession of user account names and email addresses registered on the site, but were keen for the suspects to provide their passwords, adding weight to the belief that user’s passwords were successfully encrypted with a salted MD5 hash.

Suspects were then released on bail while the police went to make further enquiries. It is believed that those arrested will have to appear at a designated police station on the same day that Alan Ellis is to answer his bail, July 1st 2008. So far, Cleveland Police haven’t responded to our request for information.

A really nice gesture has been made by the team of solicitors working on behalf of OiNK administrator Alan Ellis. They have offered free legal support to certain arrested individuals.

Source: OiNK Pre-Releasers Accused of Conspiracy To Defraud Music Industry

Would OiNK users really become a target for the police, despite the presumed civil status of sharing music on P2P networks? If so, why?

Right from the start, there has been a concerted effort by various elements of the music industry to portray everyday citizens using OiNK – presumably including the likes of Trent Reznor – as hardened criminals out to ruin the industry. At the time, BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor called OiNK a “closed criminal network” and unfortunately this type of comment set the general tone for many follow up news articles.

In reality, OiNK offered no music of its own but was the venue of an unofficial virtual party, where a limited number of people listened to music without fees or charges, in a modern take on pirate radio – but with a twist. If people had some music to share with others then so much the better, they could bring it along, add it to the index (and that’s all OiNK was, an index) and everyone could listen, to see if they liked it too.

Of all things, it was certainly not about money and a large proportion of the members wouldn’t even have considered that sharing music would result in police knocking on the door, any more than as a result of them using YouTube. But knock they did.

Last week Cleveland Police arrested a user of OiNK in the Cheshire area, who was questioned and later released on police bail. It is alleged that the individual – a normal user of the site who has no previous involvement with the police and no criminal convictions – uploaded a solitary album in early 2007.

Furthermore, information suggests that the police will be arresting and interviewing more users in the course of this investigation but at this stage it is unclear exactly who they are targeting and why. A one-off album uploader seems an unlikely target, particularly as legally in the UK, the fact that the album was allegedly pre-released – as opposed to released after retail – means little.

Going on previous cases, uploading (sharing) would be a civilly actionable offense – lawyers Davenport Lyons in the UK are happy to send out bills to those it claims uploaded its client’s games and the police aren’t interested. But for reasons no-one seems to fully understand, the police are involved in this case and have sent a car full of officers to make an arrest at the individual’s place of work, all for sharing a few minutes of music.

Another issue up for debate is the big question mark sitting over the usefulness of site logs. Stats are manipulated all the time for one reason or another and trackers have to rely on a user’s torrent client reporting data correctly. To be anywhere close to proving infringement it is necessary to track the transfer of data from within the swarm by directly receiving data from the uploader. This is fairly trivial, does not require the site logs and importantly should’ve been done at the time the album was uploaded. Why there has been such a huge delay in taking further action is unknown.

Last year saw an unexplained shift in the way copyright actions are dealt with in the UK. Out of nowhere, both OiNK and the popular TV-Links sites were taken down by police action where one would usually expect a civil lawsuit, leaving prominent legal experts intrigued as to the legal basis.

Uploading one album is not the world’s most heinous crime, in fact, unless the UK legal system changed overnight, it’s not a crime at all since there would’ve been no commercial gain for the user. So what route is this investigation taking? What is the significance of arresting this individual and investigating others over a seemingly small civil issue, and why has it taken so long to do so?

As usual, there are more questions than answers. The arrests have started, but it is unknown how many people are involved. We contacted the Police department that was responsible for at least one arrest, however, they did not respond to our inquiries. If you have any information, please contact TorrentFreak here, as we will post an update of the arrests later this weekend.

Source: OiNK Investigation: Police Start Making Arrests

The site, which closed in December 04, after Hanff and the site’s administrators heard about raids in Holland, was not administered by Hanff, but by some online friends of his. Shortly after this dawn raid by a process server, Hanff -who had just started a new job- appeared on an episode of the BBC show “NewsNight”. The day after it aired, he was fired, for having views on copyright that the company felt were incompatible with its own, and for not disclosing the case.

That was the situation at the end of 2005 anyway. And now, more than two years have passed and he has heard nothing new. Despite the claims in the letters he has received, Hanff doesn’t think the case went any further, and was quietly dropped. “The last thing I had was a letter from the MPAA lawyers with a copy of a motion for a default [judgment]“, he told TorrentFreak. “That was November 2005 , had that motion been granted I should have heard from the courts.” The hearing in question would have been around the middle of December 2005. “I haven’t even received anything from the court about that hearing , which I should have done , so I am sceptical as to whether or not it actually went ahead”

Perhaps the MPAA felt they didn’t need to proceed any more, after all, thanks to the case, Mr Hanff lost his job, and they didn’t have to run the risk of an adverse judgment in court. As has been discussed in the past, the anti-filesharing litigation campaigns seems to be less about compensating the artists, and more about harassment, and manufacturing cases to boost lobbying efforts. It would appear that this is just more of the same , mudslinging in lieu of any actual case. The document received by Mr. Hanff is certainly full of accusations, threats, and exaggerations , something that recently cost a French Lawyer her ability to practice law.

It does bring into some doubt the ability or the desire for the MPAA to litigate outside the cozy confines of the US. It also seems to indicate the way the oink case will go, as it just had it’s bail date extended again, although it is a criminal case, whilst dvdr-core is a civil case. Nevertheless, the extension of the case with no action except the initial accusation does draw the similarities closer.

In the meantime, Mr Hanff has been spending his energies tacking Phorm, the illegal and widespread invasion of browsing privacy to target adverts via deep packet inspection in association with UK ISPs. His dissertation on the subject can be read here.

Source: MPAA Silently Drops Case Against BitTorrent Site

TorrentFreak contacted Cleveland Police, but we were told that there was was no one available at the press office who could comment on the bail extension. Most likely, they need more time to gather evidence from the computers, laptop and mobile phones they still have in their possession.

OiNK was considered by many to be the finest BitTorrent music tracker the world has ever seen. The site tracked hundreds and thousands of torrents of the finest recordings, from virtually every musical genre. With millions of peers, it was more popular than most public trackers.

Jeremy Banks, Head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit described OiNK differently, and said the site was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online,” he said.

Based on information from IFPI and others, Cleveland police claimed that OiNK was a money machine, and that Alan was making hundreds of thousands of pounds. The people who actually visited OiNK, however, know that the site was free to use. This was backed up by Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails: “If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

The IFPI and BPI did not only feed the police “misleading” information, they also took over the OiNK.cd domain and displayed an ominous message indicating an investigation into the site’s users had begun. These threats were intended to scare former OiNK members, and they succeeded in this until OiNK reclaimed the domain.

With the third extension in a row, the speculation about potential charges continues. At the moment it remains unclear what evidence the police are trying to find, but I assume they have figured out by now that the site is not as evil as the IFPI and BPI wanted them to believe.

Source: OiNK’s Bail Date Extended Yet Again by Police

Now, according to Silicon, the BPI is teaming up with the IFPI to develop systems to track down unauthorized music sharing on the Internet.

Jollyon Benn, an Internet investigator for the Anti Piracy Unit of the BPI, said that more people than ever are sharing their music collections online because BitTorrent clients are becoming so easy to use. He said: “The latest version of LimeWire includes a BitTorrent client in it and the user interface has got much more friendly. It is opening it up to a lot of people, it all comes down to how easy it is to do these things.”

I’m not sure that the LimeWire implementation of BitTorrent is any easier to use than that of say, uTorrent’s, but it’s certain that the BitTorrent community would only expand when an outfit such as LimeWire introduces its millions of users to the protocol. As more people get introduced to BitTorrent and move away from networks such as Gnutella, the mysterious anti-piracy ‘systems’ being developed by the BPI and IFPI come into play, which in reality are likely to be regular file-sharing clients with enhanced logging abilities.

According to Jollyon Benn, the BPI isn’t deviating away from its earlier position of not going after petty file-sharers, setting an informal threshold of around 200 tracks before chasing the sharer. Instead, Benn says that the BPI will be concentrating on “networks sharing hundreds of thousands of tracks” which immediately throws up some questions. Most BitTorrent trackers are located outside the ‘jurisdiction’ of the BPI, i.e not in the UK. Granted, this didn’t stop them working with the IFPI to shut down OiNK in the Netherlands, but of course they managed to convince the British police that some criminal activity had been taking place on the site, in order to obtain the identity of the administrator, Alan Ellis.

Since the authorities still haven’t found anything to charge Alan with – many months after his initial arrest – one has to wonder if the BPI will be so lucky in getting home address details so quickly in the future.

There certainly aren’t many UK-hosted BitTorrent trackers and the number of British BitTorrent administrators running sites located outside of the UK is unclear, but it’s unlikely there are that many. So as everyone scratches their head thinking of who on earth the BPI are talking about taking down, the battle continues, physically and more often than not, psychologically.

Source: BPI Crackdown Planned as BitTorrent Becomes ‘Too Easy’

Jeremy Banks, Head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit described it differently, as he said at the time: “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.”

Among other things, the police claimed that OiNK was a money machine, and that Alan was making hundreds of thousands of pounds. However, everyone knows that OiNK was free to use and this fact was backed up by Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails: “If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

The IFPI and BPI did not only misinform the police, they also hijacked the OiNK.cd domain and displayed an ominous message indicating an investigation into the site’s users had begun. These propagandistic threats were supposed to scare former OiNK members, and they succeeded in this until OiNK reclaimed the domain.

With today’s extension, the speculation about potential charges continues. At the moment it remains unclear what evidence the police are trying to find, but I assume they have figured out by now that the site is not as evil as the IFPI and BPI wanted them to believe.

To be continued.

Source: Police Extend OiNK’s Bail Date Once Again

A group of musicians calling themselves ‘The Overdub Tampering Committee’ (TOTC) have just made a rather unusual announcement. For the last 3 years TOTC have been downloading newly-leaked albums from the internet and using them to create new versions of the tracks. They added their own instruments, and used additional production techniques in the style of the original recording, to create a subtle remix of the original.

Within hours, they then re-released the slightly modified albums back onto file-sharing networks and BitTorrent sites such as OiNK and The Pirate Bay. “If you illegally download music on the internet the chances that our work is in your collection is very, very likely! In fact, you might have a whole lot of us!”, they claim. In fact, ‘Polluting’ P2P networks with this music didn’t end the spread. TOTC have seen their works spread as far as radio stations. No prizes for guessing where they got it from.

It all started around 4 years ago, a member of TOTC downloaded an album only to hear that someone had tampered with it in the middle. This got them thinking: “What if this problem got more insidious, subtle, and widespread? What if there was a network of musicians who got a hold of albums right as they leaked, added subtle yet very much additional overdubs all over the album, and then re-leaked it to the internet?” That’s exactly what they have been doing for the past few years.

Even though the group seem to want to ‘pollute’ P2P networks with these ‘remixes’, they also dislike the music industry:

Attempting to police and punish “illegal downloaders” with lawsuits and fines is misguided and, in our opinion, a waste of time. This model treats the music fans as criminals. That’s an insane business model. But we expect nothing less than insanity from large, crumbling corporations. We do not know how the music industry will change in the next few years and we don’t know how a method will arise to ensure that musicians are properly paid for their recorded work. We have no solutions.

TOTC, who are all members of other active bands, say they have even released tampered versions of their own songs, and uploaded them to the Internet. “That was particularly fun for us.” they said. But what is the group’s opinion on file-sharing itself? They say they don’t think it’s wrong and download stuff themselves to test before buying on physical media.

So what was their motivation to do this?

“All we wanted to do was fuck with the treasure everyone’s hunting for to realign everyone’s perspective.”

We contacted TOTC for some additional information, but they haven’t replied so far. The Overdub Tampering Committee manifesto can be found here. (via Idolator)

Source: Have You Been Punked By TOTC?

Users of What.cd were in for more than a little shock today. Members of one of the OiNK replacement sites started receiving worrying emails from the music file-sharers arch nemesis – the mighty RIAA.

The email reads:

Date: 12 Nov 2007 11:35:46 +0100
Message-ID: <2007111XXXXXXX.XXXXX.qmail@bitient.org>
To: XXXXXXX
Subject: Music Piracy
From: piracy@riaa.org
Reply-To: piracy@riaa.org
X-Originating-IP: [76.74.24.143]
X-Originating-Email: [piracy@riaa.org]
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service

Dear registered user of the site What.cd,

We have recently been investigating the activities of the users of the site http://www.what.cd/ and we have found that this site exists for the sole purpose of music piracy.

Pirating music is a criminal offence and we believe it should be obvious to you that the results outweigh the benefits – hard working artists won’t be rewarded for their work and will stop producing music, ultimately leading to a severely reduced selection of music both in the shops and for download.

The RIAA had hoped that the disabling by the police of the large illegal music site, Oink.cd, would stop a lot of people from engaging in piracy, as they don’t want to be seen as criminals. However, this appears to not be the case, as two large new sites have sprung up in its place.

This email is the final warning to all of you who were members of Oink.cd and are current members of What.cd. If we find you to be committing any more criminal acts of piracy then we will have to press charges against you, as representatives of the major record companies of
America.

Yours Faithfully,

The RIAA

Worrying, especially as the IP address in the email seems to indicate it really is from the RIAA. Visitors to the What.cd site were then greeted with this message:

This week has been terrible. After we did two code audits and fixed our security issues, our wonderful attackers couldn’t get in (yay!), so they turned to brute force. After having been hit by several port scans and a rather fearsome DDoS attack (traffic reaching almost 80 megabits per second (note: that’s 10 megabytes per second)) our server pretty much went to hell. After an extended downtime (ending a couple hours ago) during which we tweaked firewall settings, etc., we decided that it was safe enough to bring the site back up.

Pretty much immediately after the site came back up we had someone trying to brute force our (well passworded) ssh accounts (they’ve now met the hot burny side of the firewall).

What have we learned from all this? That there is a person or a group of people somewhere that wants us to disappear. We originally thought that the attacks were by bored kids, but whoever was behind the DDoS appears to be much more serious than that. We aren’t going to publicly speculate on who is behind the attacks – we’ll leave that to you guys.

Despite these attacks, we are still up and running, and we hope to stay this way for a very long time. We have plans for this site, and we aren’t going to flush them down the drain just because some people don’t like what we’re doing. The first of our plans involves a very cool freeleech plan, but we’re going to wait until we’re sure the tracker’s relatively stable for
that. For the time being, we’re keeping freeleech on until further notice.

But what about the emails? Is the RIAA really sending them out? If not, then who is and how did they get the What.cd user database? What.cd think they have the answer in a post on their site, replicated on this Pastebin page.

Other sites are already publishing the information above and a quick Google search does indeed reveal some interesting details. Apparently, the person held responsible for the hacking and the RIAA email is only 14 year old and not as much as a threat some believed him to be. The alleged hacker’s date of birth, his hometown, hobbies and much more are detailed on Google.

Before today, he probably enjoyed telling the world about himself on social networking sites too.

He’s also mentioned on this Pastebin page full of haxor code – along with what.cd.

The youth of today….what’s the world coming to?

Update: It appears someone claiming to be ‘biscuit’ offered the database for sale and even threatened to send it to the RIAA. After deciding that he should keep it – for later ‘blackmail’ purposes he hopefully considered this link and realized it’s not worth it, deleted the database and forgot all about it.

Update: biscuit wrote that he’s not responsible for the hacking and claims that the bash log is doctored.

Source: 14 Year Old BitTorrent Hacker Threatens to Sue What.cd Users

OinkPlus displays a list of similar artists, a link to other torrents from that artist on the BitTorrent site you’re on, the artist/band’s bio, a Last.fm player, and, if available, a MySpace player. The script also displays links to the artist’s presence on Wikipedia, Amazon, Hype Machine, Pandora, and so on.

The extra data loads beneath the regular content on the .torrent download pages and integrates very well into the style of each of the compatible sites. Personally I find the script very useful to preview tracks from artists and to discover new music. Below is an example of what it looks like on The Pirate Bay.

Indieana told TorrentFreak that in future versions it will be possible to disable certain features or block the use of OinkPlus on certain sites.

Music discovery is an essential part of private torrent sites. Although OinkPlus was originally developed exclusively for OiNK, after the site was taken down by the BPI and the IFPI, its author decided to go all-out and support not only the most popular private torrent sites, but some of the most popular public ones too.

Source: OinkPlus Adds Music Discovery to BitTorrent Sites

The donations will be used to cover the legal costs Alan is likely to make. If for some reason the money isn’t needed it will be donated to an animal charity (pigs?). The official OiNK fundraiser is hosted at saveoink.com, and unlike the scams we have seen before, it is totally legit.

OiNK was considered by many to be the best BitTorrent music tracker the world has ever seen. With 180,000 members it was without a doubt one of the most popular private BitTorrent trackers. Although most of its members found a new home by now, there is little doubt that it will be very hard to equal the success of OiNK

At this point it is still unclear what the charges against Alan will be, more details on this will come out next month. We will keep you updated of course.

Source: OiNK Launches Legal Defense Fund

Now Trent has gone public and admitted where he did a lot of sharing – OiNK.

In an interview with New York Entertainment he sent his clearest pro-sharing stance yet. When asked what he thought about OiNK being shutdown, he had this to say:

“I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”

Everyone knows that OiNK was free to use and this fact was backed up by Trent: “If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

Leveling criticism at professionals who are failing to make a better job of music distribution than OiNK and failing to create a brand which people like to be associated with, Trent explained: “iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc.”

Trent says he prefers Amazon to iTunes but says none of them address the issue of pre-release leaks, calling it a ‘difficult puzzle’. “If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it?”

The quality uploaders at OiNK get a mention too: “People on those boards, they’re grateful for the person that uploaded it — they’re the hero. They’re not stealing it because they’re going to make money off of it; they’re stealing it because they love the band.”

Underlining the fact that sometimes people pirate because they aren’t getting what they want from the music labels, Trent finishes up: “I’m not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.”

And what people seem to want is OiNK replacement sites – and that’s what they seem to be getting.

Need any invites Trent?

Source: Nine Inch Nails Frontman Was a Member of OiNK

What.cd (currently offline at time of publication) was founded the day of the OiNK takedown. “I felt sick to my stomach all morning” was how ‘What’, co-founder of what.cd described the day OiNK got raided. “We plan to grow into a large tracker – probably not as large as oink, and not as open, but eventually, I would like to support at least a hundred thousand users,” he adds

Waffles.fm on the other hand, doesn’t open for another few hours (12:01AM PST on October 31st). “In principle we’re filling a gap in the market – a lot of people just don’t get on with open / lenient trackers. In restoring that we’re also bringing back the community OiNK had, which is a big part of it,” is how waffles co-founder ‘Barney’ put his site to TorrentFreak. He is also not being as openly ambitious at first as “What” either “We’re looking at inviting perhaps 200 or less people on the opening day. We’ll gradually invite more people as things progress.”

Neither of the admins showed much enthusiasm for BOiNK, the project that is in development by the guys behind The Pirate Bay. Their main concerns were in the overall quality, and longevity of torrents on a public tracker. Somewhat ironically, however, both sites are aiming on moving to take up permanent hosting at the PRQ datacenter, as soon as upgrades there are complete. “The electricians started their work of installing another 3x200A feed yesterday” a PRQ source told TorrentFreak today.

And the reaction of the old OiNK staffers? Paine, currently the public voice of the old OiNK team, had no real comment on them, beyond hoping they both do well, and reiterating that neither is an ‘official’ replacement for OiNK.

Source: What Waffles? The Hydra Lives On

OiNK was considered by many to be the finest BitTorrent music tracker the world has ever seen. Tracking only the finest recordings from virtually every musical genre, beautifully labeled and cataloged releases were its trademark, created by people who thrived under some of the harshest releasing rules the torrent community had ever seen. Nothing less than the highest quality was good enough for OiNK.

Then the IFPI huffed and puffed and blew down the little pigs home and they had ‘won’.

Not quite. Did the entire OiNK indexed music library disappear? Did the releasers all see the error of their ways and stop releasing there and then? Did all the ex-members give up sharing? No, of course not.

OiNK didn’t carry any content, its users did. Taking out the OiNK site didn’t remove a single song from any of OiNK’s users libraries and they are taking their collections with them as they migrate to other sites, ready to share another day.

TorrentFreak has been listening to some interesting comments from some specialist music trackers (such as those on this list) who are not only getting record numbers of signups in the last few days but are also delighted to welcome talented OiNK releasers who seem really keen to share.

One admin told us: “Since the shutdown of OiNK we’re getting a spike in new memberships, at least 6 times more. Normally some of these can be bad members who do not share or are making trouble in the forum but I am happy to say that many come from OiNK and they are behaving like gentlemen (and ladies!)”

He continued: “We have an uploader application form on our tracker and we ask a few questions to the guy, then we make a decision if he is reliable etc before we give him releasing rights. On a regular day that list has many applications from novices with no experience (which can be trouble!). Now we get many OiNK members asking to release in this one week. They have amazing collections and make a 100% perfect release each time. It’s a great boost for our community.”

TorrentFreak spoke with the admins of three genre-dedicated music trackers who all confirmed that they picked up lots of ex-OiNK members and offers to release this week. This could be the tip of a very, very large iceberg – OiNK covered just about every genre imaginable and all of those sharers were made homeless after the raid – many of them for up to 10 minutes – but immediately settled in elsewhere, ready to share again.

The Pink Palace may be closed, but the beats go on and on as some of the best sharers in the world spread their wings to trackers far and wide. Maybe pigs can fly after all.

Source: OiNK Releasing Talent Enhances Other Trackers

So basically, OiNK.cd is now linking to a google search result that links to a blog entry by Brokep that lists several private music trackers that have links (torrents) to copyrighted music albums.

The point OiNK is making here is that Google is no different from OiNK – both sites link to infringing content – something he earlier told Telegraph. The big question is: “is linking illegal?”

Besides making a statement, the revived OiNK website is also supporting “the hydra“. The problem the BitTorrent community has currently, is that a few big sites carry the majority of the weight. Resources need to be spread around in a manner which ensures that a few ‘big bombs’ are unable to dismantle major parts of the infrastructure, and by supporting smaller trackers to grow, the hydra will become even more invincible.

They can take one BitTorrent tracker down but others will grow. OiNK was without a doubt the most popular music BitTorrent tracker, but now its down, smaller trackers will be eager to fill the gap.

Update: The old index2.html was also transferred, with a few updates of course. Check the page source if you want a laugh, they actually used MS Word as their html editor.

Waffles FTW!

Source: OiNK Makes a Statement Which Seems to Support the BitTorrent Hydra

Quite a few people asked the question: “Why Are The IFPI and BPI Allowed To Hijack OiNK” No answer has been given to this question yet, but it seems to be less relevant now.

It now seems that the OiNK.cd domain no longer points to the IFPI and BPI propaganda messages, instead it now shows a waffles site, which is hosted in The Pirate Bay servers.

Yesterday The Pirate Bay announced that it will launch an OiNK replacement named BOiNK. However, this has nothing to do with OiNK.cd and OiNK.me.uk. These domains will be used for something totally different and there are no plans to relaunch OiNK.

Both OiNK.cd and OiNK.me.uk (the old domain) now use The Pirate Bay’s nameservers. At this point it is still unsure what the plans are for the OiNK domain. It is not likely that the tracker will return in its original form, right now it is “the number 1 site in the world for waffle recipes,” an inside joke.

There will be an official announcement of what will happen to the OiNK domains soon, stay tuned!

Source: OiNK Domains Now Point To The Pirate Bay DNS

Some are displaying the amount of donations they have received and these seem sizable in some cases. Although there is no doubt that some generous supporters have already given to these funds, its likely the amounts of donations shown have been inflated to imply that this is the correct fund to donate to.

Fact: NONE of these sites are sanctioned or set up in collaboration with OiNK, so please, please, please – don’t give them your money! This has been confirmed by TorrentFreak directly with OiNK himself.

This means ALL sites claiming to try to raise funds for OiNK should be considered dubious. It’s entirely possible that some good natured individuals are trying to genuinely raise money but it’s impossible to separate the scammers from the tiny minority of honest people.

There may not even be a fund in the end, this hasn’t been decided yet so in the meantime, please keep your money safe.

Potential donors are advised to wait until we make an announcement about the correct fund to donate to. We will do that here on TorrentFreak.

Stay tuned.

Source: Scammers Try to Cash In On OiNK Misery

The most important thing about BOiNK is perhaps the message it sends out to the IFPI and the BPI: It shows that that if you stop one tracker, others will pop up days after. It is a hydra. Call it a slap in the face if you want.

BOiNK will probably be ready in a few days. People from the Pirate Bay, Mininova, TorrentFreak and even the recently arrested (and released) OiNK admin are currently at The Oil of the 21st Century conference where they are – among other things – discussing filesharing, culture and copyright related issues.

BOiNK is a Pirate Bay only project, OiNK and other BitTorrent sites are not involved.

In the meantime, please stay away from scam sites that pretend to be related to OiNK. All they will do is take your money and run away. As soon as there’s an approved donation campaign (if there will be any) we will report it here.

Brokep from the Pirate Bay working on BOiNK.

Source: The Pirate Bay To Bring Back OiNK

‘OiNK’ himself participated in a short Q&A and the truth is that this is not the case. Here is a rundown of the salient points:

The raid was completely unexpected and came with no warning at all but steps had already been taken to protect the users. Although there was no ‘self-destruct’ or encryption according to OiNK, “the logs we store aren’t enough to incriminate users.” This will come as a huge relief to ex-members of OiNK.

A Cleveland Police spokesman told The Telegraph: “It is too early to tell if we will go after individuals, it all depends on what we find.”

OiNK is accused of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringements with police questioning OiNK for hours after which he was eventually released. It became apparent that the police had limited technical knowledge which, according to OiNK “made the interview quite amusing.”

OiNK’s father – who was also dragged into this, is fine – although the police took his laptop.

There was an implication that a backup of the site may exist, although this is unconfirmed and there is no news yet that the forums will be restored for the purposes of music discussion. Additionally, it’s unclear if OiNK remains the owner of the OiNK.CD domain.

Sites have been cropping up claiming to collect donations for legal defense but according to OiNK there aren’t any that potential donators should feel comfortable donating to right now.

Certain changes had been made to the OiNK site and IRC channel in recent weeks security-wise and there was a suggestion that this may have been because a raid was expected. OiNK has denied this and confirmed these changes were a coincidence.

In echoes of what happened to Alexander Hanff (admin of the BitTorrent tracker DVDR-Core) Alan Ellis aka OiNK has been fired from his IT Consultant job following the raid but has refused to elaborate on what grounds his employer – Virgin Media in Stockton-on-Tees – chose to dismiss him.

It’s hugely commendable that OiNK has taken the time to come out and give the community timely facts. Alan told The Daily Telegraph: “I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t believe my website breaks the law. They don’t understand how it works.”

Stay Tuned

Update: Seems like someone involved in the takedown left an administrative message on the OiNK site (thanks for the tips DaanRiver and R10T):

Source: OiNK Database Didn’t ‘Self Destruct’, Wasn’t Encrypted But Users Safe?

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 Tondel 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.

Tondel 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, Tondel 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.

Tondel 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.

Source: OiNK Down, Norwegian BitTorrent Trackers Next

They also condemn the police forces for allowing the presumption of innocence to be discarded, in that the domain of the website, has been effectively hijacked, and replaced by a page insinuating guilt on the part of the site owner. The ‘Presumption of Innocence’, better known as “innocent until proven guilty” is a cornerstone of law both in the Netherlands and UK. Surely, if anyone should have put a temporary website under the Oink domain, then it should have been the Cleveland police, or the Dutch police, not the record label owners union.

This violation of what should be standard practices brings into question the ethics and procedures of the forces involved. Cleveland police have yet to respond to inquiries, however.

Of further interest is the apparent investigation on the Dutch side by the Investigation Service of the Tax and Customs Administration (or FIOD-ECD for short). This would appear to be in relation to the claimed monies that were paid by users for access to the site, which are known to us here at TorrentFreak as “voluntary donations”, but then we do our homework. The question does come to be how these criminal investigation groups manage to execute these raids, without first having done any investigation; undoubtedly heads will roll.

Timing is another interesting aspect to this case. Reportedly, the IFPI are upset that the Pirate Bay has acquired ifpi.com. However, it’s a domain they’ve not had control of (at least according to archive.org) since early this year at the latest, and so it’s hard to see how they will be able to have anything done about it, legally. Could this raid then be a retaliatory action on their part, targeting another site rather than the Pirate Bay, who are/were probably expecting some sort of backlash like this?

Whilst claims in the various press releases (BPI, IFPI, Cleveland police) all state that the site was notorious for pre-release music, it’s also relevant to consider the source of that music. According to a 2003 study by AT+T labs into the movie industry, the majority of early releases came from insiders, and its unlikely that the music industry is any different. Indeed, according to ‘apathy’, a moderator at music site Economy of Sound, several pre-releases have come from the record companies direct, where they have had the view that “you just cannot buy that kind of publicity.” Claims that pre-releases hurt sales are also not found to be based in fact, the Meshuggah album “Nothing” was leaked onto the internet, and became their best-seller.

However, perhaps the biggest thing to remember is that private sites store information. Thats how they work, and there is always some saved, in order to run ratios etc. In the end, we’re right back to the question, “Are Private Torrent Sites Safe” and it would appear that they are becoming less so as time goes on, irrespective of the law.

Source: Why Are The IFPI and BPI Allowed To Hijack OiNK?

More interesting perhaps, how did they gain access to the OiNK domain, and why are they allowed to spread this propaganda? They are not a law-enforcement agency.

NFOrce, the ISP of OiNK, said today in an interview that they were not aware of any illegal activities surrounding the site. They thought OiNK was hosting a streaming video site or a weblog. Yeah, right.

The BBC did a small report on the arrest with a lot of false information, releasing nonsense statements such as: “illegally downloading music onto his website” and “paying subscriptions to enter the website.” The video of the arrest is shown below, see for yourself.

Source: OiNK Admin Released From Custody

Many of OiNK’s users have been enquiring if their details are safe on the site. The message: “A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users” will not exactly fill them with confidence.

However, everyone in the BitTorrent world will be familiar with the propaganda put out by anti-piracy organizations and many will be familiar with a similar situation a few years ago when the LokiTorrent tracker was closed and seemingly none of the users were tracked down. Fear, uncertainty and doubt – it’s all part of the anti-p2p strategy but it’s hugely doubtful that 180,000 users will be pursued, it’s just not cost effective and most are scattered around the globe.

According to whois.sc, the visitors to the site are split: United States 50.7%, United Kingdom 7%, Canada 6%, Sweden 3.2%, Germany 2.7% and Netherlands at just 1.9%. Although of questionable accuracy, these figures should give at least an idea of the trend on the site.

Clearly the statement on the homepage is designed to scare all the ex-OiNK members back into the record shops and not let them think it’s safe to join another tracker. That strategy has been tried before (You Can Click But You Can’t Hide) and it doesn’t work. Additionally, more and more people are choosing to protect their privacy with VPN services such as VPNTunnel and Relakks, finding that a small investment is worth the peace of mind in the long run.

So who are the players in this OiNK takedown?

Most people know about the IFPI – The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. This organization says it represents the worldwide interests of the recording industry with the backing of nearly 1,500 record businesses in 75 countries. Its main aim is to fight piracy.

The BPI – British Phonographic Industry is similar to the RIAA in the US. It’s made up of hundreds of music businesses and fronted by the ‘big four’ – EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner. Created in 1973, its stated main aim is to combat piracy.

The FIOD-ECD – Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police is a worrying inclusion to the list of people involved in the closure of OiNK. FIOD-ECD is a Dutch government agency dedicated to chasing down people alleged to be involved in fiscal, financial and economic fraud – usually major criminals. With these people involved, getting access to records from hosts wouldn’t have proven too difficult – FIOD-ECD are not just another BREIN, they have some serious powers.

People familiar with the ShareConnector and Releases4u cases in the Netherlands will remember the involvement of FIOD-ECD. The case took over 2 years to come to court and the result was a complete failure for them. The admin of ShareConnector got off completely and a couple of small fines (around $350) were handed out to the admins of Releases4U for uploading copyright material. Additionally, FIOD-ECD failed to provide enough evidence to prove ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement nor enough to prove that either organization was criminal in nature.

Many people will be keeping their fingers crossed that the progress against OiNK mirrors this.

Following a 2 year investigation (or 3 month investigation, depending on the source) which involved Interpol, Police are insisting that OiNK was a pay site. Members were given the option to donate but this insistence that OiNK was some sort of criminal network where people paid to be a member is clearly untrue but it’s likely that this is the reason the real police (as opposed to the ‘copyright police’) and FIOD-ECD are involved.

Jeremy Banks of the IFPI said: “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure.”

Yes it was Jeremy.

Source: OiNK Investigation Seeks Identities and Activities of Users

According to early reports OiNk’s servers were confiscated in Amsterdam last week. This seems to be unlikely because the site was still fully functional 24 hours ago. The administrator of OiNK was arrested this morning by the Cleveland Police. The BBC reports that his employer and the home of his father were raided as well.

Jeremy Banks, Head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, said in a reponse to the news: “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.”

OiNK hosted hundreds and thousands of torrents with over a million peers which makes it more popular than most public trackers. The site was known to be one of the first places where leaked music albums appeared, so anti-piracy outfits such as MediaDefender were keeping a close eye on it.

In July the tracker already changed its name from OiNK.me.uk to OiNK.cd due to “legal” issues with their domain registrar. Unfortunately it now seems that the popular private BitTorrent tracker is in bigger trouble.

developing story…

Source: OiNK.cd Servers Raided, Admin Arrested

David Watanabe, the developer, has now released Xtorrent 1.1 (beta). Here’s what’s new:

Interface changes
Xtorrent has gotten what the developer calls a “newly refreshed user interface”. New, sleeker-looking toolbar buttons that resemble those in the Leopard Finder, including a number of other interface tweaks have been added.

Selective Downloading
What was one of the most requested features, followed by encryption, is the ability to pick and choose which files you want to download from inside a torrent. Xtorrent finally lets you do this. Up until recently, Azureus was the only Mac BitTorrent client that could do this. Transmission added the feature a few weeks ago.

File Prioritisation
You can now tell Xtorrent which files in a torrent you want to give more priority to and have downloaded first. This was another oft-requested feature, according to Watanabe.

Xtorrent is quickly becoming the uTorrent of the Macintosh. Not uTorrent Mac, which we gave you a preview of, but the Mac equiavalent of uTorrent Windows. It’s light, has many important features and has a pretty UI. The only difference is that Xtorrent is shareware and uTorrent is not. But it’s widely known that the Mac community is a lot more open to shareware than most Windows users.

Unfortunately, Xtorrent still has its drawbacks. Its intrusive shareware policy is still very much there, rearing its ugly head at people without licenses. And some popular private trackers explicitly ban Xtorrent from connecting to torrents and downloading them. OiNK, possibly the most exclusive private BitTorrent site, whose invites are highly sought after, and till they banned the practise, were auctioned off on eBay for ridiculous amounts of dough, has banned Xtorrent. Here’s the message OiNK users who try to download with Xtorrent get:

Source: Xtorrent Gets New UI, Selective Downloading

Unfortunately the legal issues with the domain registrar (Nominet) seemed to be unsolvable. The dispute was caused by the British law firm Addleshaw Goddard. On behalf of ebook writer Darren Shan they demanded that Nominet took action against OiNK.

“Kind of stupid really, since his crappy ebooks had about 10 snatches total, and this is predominantly a music site”, OiNK said in a response, and they saw no other solution than to switch to a new domain. The domain change was announced on the OiNK website earlier today:

“Because of the recent DNS issues, and the undesirable solution to fix them, we are changing the site’s name from OiNK.me.uk to OiNK.cd. The OiNK.me.uk domain will soon cease to function, and a full changeover will happen shortly.”

The OiNK team also advises its users to re-download all .torrent files. “Torrents downloaded from now on will contain 2 tracker addresses, the new OiNK.cd domain, and the tracker’s IP address, which should make any future DNS issues less serious”, they say.

Members who don’t want to re-download all .torrent files can also use the hosts file workaround, which might be an easier option for people who have 100+ torrents loaded into their BitTorrent client.

Source: OiNK.me.uk is Dead, Long Live OiNK.cd

If you don’t like torrents try MP3 Search. The site carries in excess of 50,000 albums from 46,000 artists. Prices start at $0.19 per track. Most tracks are in high quality bitrate, 320 kbps. The site accepts major credit cards.

A few people have been panicking over the last 48 hours since they can no longer access the OiNK BitTorrent tracker. Understandable perhaps, when one considers the developments in the Netherlands during the last week involving everlasting.nu, Demonoid and Leaseweb.

However, they are not down but are experiencing some DNS issues – the mechanism by which easily readable domain names such as OiNK.me.uk are translated to their corresponding IP addresses.

In the meantime, it is still possible to access the site by using its IP address and typing it directly into your browsers address bar. The IP address is: 85.17.40.71

Those that are happy to experiment with their Hosts file may edit it and add the following information for continued access to OiNK, it’s tracker and IRC channel. From the OiNK site:

“We apologise for the continuing DNS problems. You can get around this by adding our hostnames directly to your hosts file. Add the following lines to your \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file (the number of spaces between the IP and the name doesn’t matter as long as there’s at least one space (or tab):”

85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.71 oink.me.uk

Hopefully the issues will be fixed soon.

Source: OiNK is Alive! Learn How to Access