Why Are The IFPI and BPI Allowed To Hijack OiNK?
Written by Ben Jones on October 24, 2007As you have read here already, a joint team of Dutch and British law enforcement were involved in ‘Operation Ark Royal’, to take down the music torrent site Oink. This action however, has brought lots of questions, with very few answers. Questions such as “Why Are The IFPI and BPI Allowed To Hijack OiNK?”
The British and Dutch Pirate Parties have issued a joint statement (English/Dutch) condemning the actions as retaliatory, and questioning the ethics of choreographing it, and letting representatives of the victims participate in the investigation. How many times do they let the father of a murder victim work on the investigation of the Murder?
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.
Previously: OiNK Admin Released From Custody
Next: OiNK Down, Norwegian BitTorrent Trackers Next
149 Responses
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it is about time ppl learned that private sites are no safer than public ones.
too many sites give out this false information and it should stop.
these sites are giving false hope to ppl and it should stop now!!
it is a shame that oink went down especially to some ruthless anti piracy firm who by the looks of it should not have been able to do this in the first place as they lied theu their ass but get away with it ..
secret service plastered their logo all over the homepage when they took down shadowcrew
http://www.mininova.org/tor/956968
Torrents have got NOTHING to do with “The Scene”
Oink was part of the “Torrent Scene”
Who was so lucky to have some people leaking from the record labels & THE scene.
[quote comment="194317"]and this is exactly the reason why the scene hates p2p..[/quote]
THE scene does not “hate” p2p.
They hate the insecurity of p2p.
@least most of them nowadays.
Since there is more pressure from feds, and more and more ridicoulous laws.
More groups shift towards a more liberal policy in favor of p2p.
Some of them even have become commercial in order to pay the assets they need for protecting themselves from FBI and such.
just like when TPB got raided..
FFS since WHEN did our police forces take orders from PRIVATE LOBBY ORGANISATIONS?? from other countries!!1
I get so pissed off, ill be pirating ALOT more now, hope they will feel it but i rather put a shotgun to their faces!!
The reason the recording industry is so afraid of p2p sites like oink.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMhGzoLx0qo&NR=1
The irony to the claims that oink was the source of pre-release music is pretty laughable. Sure they would have pre-release music at times, but many times it would get taken down as it might have been transcoded or from an unknown source. Oink was great for getting high quality recordings, but saying they were great for pre-release stuff is funny. Since Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out it still wasn’t on Oink because it was only a 160kb rip which wasn’t to the standards of the site, even though the album is up on every other torrent site going.
All of this crap about pre-releases is BS. The last pre-release thing that I got from Oink was the new Seether album. It was officially released yesterday, so I figured that I could find it on the internet sometime last weekend. I checked Oink every hour waiting for it. As soon as I found it on Oink, last Friday afternoon, I wanted to let my buddy know so that he could download it too. It just so happens that I was able to find it on Demonoid as well, so I pointed my buddy in that direction. My point to this is, Oink didn’t get the pre-release any faster than any other torrent site. And it wasn’t even that much of a pre-release… Someone who worked at a record store probably took a CD home and ripped it as soon as the shipment came in.
[quote comment="194179"]i’d bet what ifpi really wanted to do was to get to nforce.nl, that site gotta be like throwing salt in the entertainment industrie’s wounds, in their eyes that is…[/quote]
Nforce, is a hosting company , and only show NFO’s completely legal.
Although they are researching it for over 2 years.
Saterday, I have a apointment with Nforce. Aftewards, I will post a story.
for proove; Http://www.nforce.nl
[quote comment="194428"]The reason the recording industry is so afraid of p2p sites like oink.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMhGzoLx0qo&NR=1/quote
so true
The Britney pre was on there as of Monday night, for some reason I didn’t download it, that might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back?
[quote comment="194386"]Animosity released their cd weeks before it came out on OINK. they had their own account!!![/quote]
There weren’t the only one. There were other indie bands that pre-released their stuff on oink. Some of them had success with it. Many users actually bought their albums after they had listened to it.
Who knows, maybe that’s the real reason why the Nazi regime of big labels wanted to see oink down.
Of course they have no interest in seeing indie labels being successful =|
[quote comment="193898"]certainly ‘huh?’, the concern is not the actions or their legalities - believe it or not, thats not for an industry body to decide, its for a court of law - but that the proper legal practices were carried through.
People go ‘but she did it’ when talking about Jammie Thomas, and now about this, but the issue is about how the case was done, was it done properly. The thomas case it seems that the jury had both been improperly instructed, and had already been the recipiant of case-related material from the plaintiffs (every time they start a DVD for instance) which is procedurally wrong.
The best thing to remember is, if these cases were so cut and dried, so simple a matter of ‘it’s illegal’, then why is it neccesary for the industry to make extravigent unsupported claims, and distort facts? Clear facts don’t need ‘amplification’.
That is what we also have here, and it sets a bad precident. If you don’t like presumption of innocense now, why would you like it if you were to be accused of a crime, no matter how baseless. It’s called law, it’s based in justice and fairness, and its abuse is something that shouldn’t be tollerated, no matter what the alleged crimes are.[/quote]
does anyone know any good torrents to get fonts and vector art now that oink is dead?
If OiNK users were to NOT BUY records for the next 6 months… I know most of them didn’t anyway, but there has never, and I mean it, been a “don’t buy records” campaign. Do you think that would scare them? At least it’s intimidation, very much like that Firefox button that got so popular. A button (not with OiNK-related art, just a button) saying: “I’m against the ridiculous profit of music industries” or a very sincere “I love music”.
I say that every website that is with us, every user around, put that in their signatures and webpages. It might not work, but it’s worth a try.
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/6504/oinkimageif8.png
How does one find a list of IFPI labels? I didnt even know they existed until this Oink raid.
Why don’t the record companies wake up? The cd and the high street outlets are dead. Just provide download sites with a choice of file types and encoding rates, reflected in the sale price. Is it too much to ask to have the latest band in, say 320 k in ogg/vorbis for example??
It’s not bloody rocket science is it ffs???
[quote comment="194258"]i just hope the sysadmins made some sort of emergency backup of the site on a weekly basis and stored it offsite.[/quote]
as far as i remember there was a backup of the site made everyday around 8~9 PM or AM tough i’m not completely sure if it was hosted offsite or even offline o.o
i just hope that there will be a reincarnation of oink thats possibly hosted by the archnemesis and possible one of the biggest fans of Hollywood : The Pirate Bay!
just read main man is nicked and raided even his mums house guess no more oink
[quote comment="194521"]The Britney pre was on there as of Monday night, for some reason I didn’t download it, that might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back?[/quote]
LOL!!!
link pls
the only way ‘the war’ of music downloading between record companies and downloaders can be lost is if the internet as an information highway becomes non-neutral, that is solely owned by a particular entity, private or public. think about what it would be like if only certain drivers could use a road or highway. until that happens, people will always download music, myself included. anyone who agrees with me should fight for net neutrality, plain and simple.
alank, i agree…fuck record companies, they need to change their strategy. instead of trying to shut down these music sites, they should take a hint.. run music downloading operations as profit centers that pay royalties to them. they’re greedy businessmen though, not IT workers..they stick to what they think works.
Why did the investigation go on for two years? Isn’t that something like entrapment?
And about the upload amounts, I remember there were several users in the top ten with something like 20 terabytes uploaded and 5mb downloaded, I’d guess these would be the guys they’re going after. I don’t understand why users like that existed, seems a bit strange.
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