OiNK.cd Servers Raided, Admin Arrested
This story has been unfolding within the last 24 hours, and its an interesting cross section of what's going on right now in the file-sharing scene. OiNK.cd is a well known private BitTorrent tracker for pre-release music albums. That being said, it was already being pretty closely watched by MediaSentry and probably tons of other agencies worldwide.
Being owned by a man in England and having servers in the Netherlands, however, left OiNK a prime target to be demolished by a joint effort between the IFPI and BPI (record associations and anti-piracy advocates) as well as Dutch police forces. The website right now mentions "suspected illegal music distribution" but a lawyer would probably know the consequences better than I. Fortunately this is a blog and I can just put in my opinion regardless.
Being a BitTorrent network, most of the content is really owned by the users, which makes it more of a challenge to really win in court against a site like OiNK, who is really just a medium of exchange. You can't close down a shady corner of a city just because drug deals are going down. This brings us to the crucial point of this. It appears that OiNK is being forced to cooperate by revealing the IP addresses and usernames for all of its users.
This is an issue because these people don't want to go to jail. Really, that's it in a nutshell, but it'll be difficult to both pin IP addresses to people and then try to win in court (actually the RIAA did just that last month but that's a story for another entry. Hopefully this will go away quietly and nobody will get hurt, and even if they take down both the site and all of its users, ten more private trackers will pop up.
What's next for the illegal file-sharing scene? Who knows. Private tracker networks are going down hard and fast while the RIAA is finally getting into real lawsuits with KaZaA users from years ago. With a story about a Usenet provider being looked into, there might not really be any safe ways to "do business" anymore online. College kids everywhere begin to cry as they are forced to pay the (high) price for music.
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