llegal Torrent Site OiNK Busted by Police

[Wheres the beef?]

http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-r...ustody-071023/

[Trick Loves The Kids]

The law clearly states that African Americans ride at the back of the bus

E

that's racist you fucking pig

[brando4n82]

The paparazzi are legal, and that doesn't make it ok to do what they do.

i honeslty dont understand how it is. i would go insane if i had to deal with that shit. i would snap and eventually break a camera and punch someone in the face. but i would end up being the one punished. nasty world

[malcolmjamalawesome]

I EXIST

[R3d Snapper]

Life sucks again. RIP Oink.

[vinylmartyr]

meh

[lowfront]

This is some depressing news.

Hopefully we might see a back up of oink pop up soon. They must have a backup right?

And as far as this heated debate on the ethics of downloading no one gives a shit.

RIP oink, my baby



now where am I going to get the pre release of the new daft punk album????

[hammerandasickle]

the holiday season is going to be so dreadful without that unlimited download capability. this is a dreadful outcome to a great community

[crazzz2007]

That's funny. Maybe this is all made-up like the lunar landing. :

and arrested a 24-year-old man. /Reuters

E

you fucking idiot. that 24-year-old man happened to be the person running the whole operation.

imbecile.

[wmgaretjax]

the holiday season is going to be so dreadful without that unlimited download capability. this is a dreadful outcome to a great community

true. granted, there are already a few replacement projects in the works. i'm in contact with a fella that I met on Oink that I actually knew back from when I populated some IRC channels that helped them build some of the code that is planning to launch a replacement in sweden.

fingers crossed.

[crazzz2007]

But the supposed ''crime'' happend in another country. Therefore, I am still immune. Doesnt matter anyway, if I go to jail 90% of this board would too if their hard drives were checked for anything that was downloaded online. And to think I just bought a external hard drive yesterday, what are the odds.

no, you are not immune.

do you really think that if you downloaded child porn from a foreign server, you would be immune? please think.

[DeltaSigChi4]

Quick, someone post a picture of the swirling .gif of that man recently captured who was accused of child molestations many countries away. Funny, Supre says he's immune.

E

[Amneeziac]

The music industry was like a bunch of ants that didn't know there was a bigger world out there. Then a kitty named Napster gave them a rude awakening. Now shitty music is ever so slowly dying away. Yay.

Sites like OiNK are like flies. The police get one and must say to themselves "one down, six million to go." And ending OiNK is pretty stupid, because I guarantee you that at least a couple hundred OiNK members will create sites just like it, or at least promote torrent-sharing of HQ music. Every time they shut down a site like OiNK, a hundred more sprout up. This is just so stupid, it's almost fun to watch.

[Boourns]

The bad thing though is I predict several spinoff sites, with none of them having the vast selection and heavy seeding as the original.

Demonoid isn't nearly as good for music, and I've seen 96kbps mp3's. Sometimes they are packed in with higher bitrate mp3's in discographies. I downloaded the Bjork discography back in February and it was a disaster.

[instinct]

About the whole scalping vs. downloading discussion.

You guys hate on scalpers too much... should have got your tickets in time. Also, the scalpers don't set the price, the people do. If everyone refused to buy tickets at such a high price, it wouldn't be that high. Scalpers also take risk and sometimes end up losing money on shows too.


Delta.. Are you member at Event Experts?


I've downloaded tons of music illegally and have made tons of cash scalping too. I don't hold much pride for doing either one, but one is stealing and one is selling tickets for a higher price than you bought them for.

Really though.. let's say for instance you bought Bjork (or whoever the fuck) concert tickets, and then found out you couldn't go (for whatever reason).. and people offered you four times as much for the ticket than you paid it, would you sell at face value? If you would, good for you.. but I got bills to pay and other concerts to attend.

[instinct]

Oh and BTW: A lot of scalpers are scum bags.

[Wheres the beef?]

The discussions going on at torrentfreak are hilarious. Look at what this guy posteds:

http://torrentfreak.com/why_are_the_...comment-194136

[Amneeziac]

The only way record companies are going to stop file-sharing is by destroying the internet.

And scalping sounds great, how do I get involved? Like, how much of a douche do I have to become before sinking that low?

[orbit]

The bad thing though is I predict several spinoff sites, with none of them having the vast selection and heavy seeding as the original.

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure something better will come up.

[gmoneyak]

[DeltaSigChi4]

Delta.. Are you member at Event Experts?

No, I'm not. Is it worth it?

E

[DeltaSigChi4]

Here is a view from another perspective:

I dont even think file sharing is a big deal when you give back to the artists, but i just worked with a band on their album release, helped with their website, ads, ecard, etc and the album got leaked a week and a half early. It really took the wind out of everyones sails. I like the hype that gets generated around a release, its like fucking christmas, you wait a year or two for the next 12 songs from your favorite artist and you buy the full presentation, artwork and all. getting an idea of what that was like for the band really bummed me out on torrent sites like that.

Artist's perspective. I enjoy this community a lot, even though they hate on me at Coachellafora-esque levels as well. Their discussion of this same subject is much richer in artists' views.

Click

E

[Neutral Milk Hotel]

Okay, fine, I'm sure they were pretty bummed out that the album leaked, but do you think they'd prefer it if the people who took a chance on them by listening to the leak and not paying just didn't take a chance on them at all because they didn't want to pay for a CD? If I were an artist, I would definitely prefer millions listening to the music for free to thousands listening to it by paying. And on a related note, if the wind really got taken out of their sails by a fucking album leak, they need to get a reality check, leaks are a part of the music industry now. David Sitek aside, from most of the accounts I've read the artists themselves don't seem to mind that much anymore about albums leaking, they accept it as a part of life. The Decemberists even made a subforum on the message board of their website for fans to discuss the Crane Wife leak.

[RotationSlimWang]

I never got an invite code, so fuck 'em and fuck all you. Also, I don't get what the big problem is. www.isohunt.com www.mininova.com

[Robototron]

Here is a view from another perspective:

More than anything else this year, music & software file-sharing site Oink changed the way I thought about the music industry & BitTorrent technology. I’d heard rumors of Oink for years but hadn’t seen the members-only site until early ‘07. Oink was anal, Oink was comprehensive. The site administrators were fierce about quality — only high-quality files from original CD/vinyl rips could be posted. Many releases were even posted as FLAC (lossless) files. Oink allowed only entire releases, with complete tracklist information (uploading an incomplete album or a poorly labeled MP3 could get you kicked off). No bootlegs or concert recordings or unfinished pre-release mixes were permitted.

In many cases, I believe that downloading an album from Oink would be both faster (more on this in a bit) and give you more information about the CD than sites like iTunes.

Think about that… a free website, which gives fast downloads of music at equivalent or higher quality than the paid music sites. And this free site has an incredibly deep collection of both new and old releases, usually in a variety of file formats and bit-rates. It’s overwhelming! First thought: wow, Oink is an amazing library. Second thought: wow, I really need to start selling DJ Rupture t-shirts, CD sales will only continue to drop & I gotta make money somehow!

My library metaphor for Oink makes more sense than economic analogies: for digital music & data, there’s lots of demand but no scarcity at all, which either requires that we rebuild an economic model not based on supply & demand, or start embracing commons analogies. I like living from my music but I also like libraries, the ideas behind libraries…

For fans, consideration of the music comes before questions of money and ownership - this is how it should be. Any system that doesn’t take that into account as a central fact is going to generate a lot of friction. When I say ’system’, I mean everything from Sony to iTunes to white-label 12″s that cost 8-pounds ($16.38!) in London shops and only have 2 songs on them. (I bought a bunch of these last week, and it hurt).

Oink didn’t offer solutions; it highlighted the problems of over-priced, over-controlled music elsewhere. Oink was an online paradise for music fans. The only people who could truly be mad at it were the ones directly profiting from the sale of digital or physical music. (Like myself! F%5k!)

Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…

About a week after I shipped out orders of the first live CD-r Andy Moor & I did, it appeared on Oink. Someone who had purchased it directly from me turned around and posted it online, for free. I wasn’t mad, I was just more stunned by the reach… and usefulness of the site.

If sharing copywritten music without paying for it were legal, than Oink was the best music website in the world.

Like many BitTorrent sites, Oink enforced share ratios. In a nutshell, share ratios mean that each user must upload a certain amount of data in relation to what they download. This feature encourages sharing. For example, a minimum share ratio of 0.20 (was that Oink’s? can’t remember) means that if you download 5 albums, then you must upload around 1 album’s worth of music, data equaling one-fifth the amount you nabbed from Oink users. If you only take (selfish leech) and do not give, or if you share, but not enough, then you eventually get kicked off.

With BitTorrent, most folks downloading the same files also upload the bits they grab, so everybody gets fast DL speeds (compare with popular files hosted on one server — incredibly slow speeds, or even server crash). Thus, a popular album (or legal linux distribution) can be grabbed in minutes with a decent internet connection. (uTorrent is a good BitTorrent client for Windows)

Watching Oink work helped me to understand the structural intelligence of BitTorrent architecture. Oink, like BitTorrent itself, became stronger & faster the more people used it - scalability writ large. Folks wanted to share - to maintain high share ratios. New releases were highly valued. But users kept older releases available as well (you never know when someone will want your Norwegian proto-deathmetal collection, so you keep your bandwidth open). Whether you call it distributed tape-sharing (to use an 80s term) or distributed piracy (to use a 90s industry term), Oink’s use of BitTorrent & careful quality control did it elegantly.

Aside: If Radiohead (the British rock band who achieved worldwide success via a long-term mutually-beneficial relationship with a major record label) were truly radical, they would have posted their new album as a BitTorrent file with a PayPal & bank account link for the fans who felt like paying. Not hosting it on some weird website with an awkward interface & requiring credit card info…

Aside: One thing I don’t understand is how Oink got taken down while Soulseek continues as it has for years… Slsk has always struck me as the least moral of the p2p systems. If you pay Soulseek $5 a month, you get ‘privileged download access‘ to files stored on Slsk users hard drives. Soulseek earns money by controlling access to the files stored on its users’ drives, users who never see any of this money. And if they don’t like the fact that paying people get special access to their data, there’s nothing they can do about it. Correction: with Slsk you have lots of control over who can access your shared files.

Oink was not “extremely lucrative” as the BBC boldfacedly claims. If I remember correctly, a one-time donation of 5 pounds would do something-or-other, but it was a far cry from Soulseek’s monthly privilege fees. Nor, for the record, did Oink “lead to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the internet months ahead of the release.” - this is strangely ironic, since Oink would strip user privileges if they were caught circulating unfinished or unofficial album versions. This was a site run by audiophiles and music obsessives!

But Pandora’s Box has been opened. Remember when Napster croaked? Piracy file-sharing is so much easier now. The anal-retentive British site admins kept Oink organized. Bittorent architecture kept Oink efficient. Oink’s alleged 180,000 users won’t forget how useful it was. The next Oink will be sturdier & more multiple. The overall movement is towards more ways to share music & ideas with like-minded individuals on the internet.

The way I see it, this can only be a good thing for music fans. And what musician is not first a music fan?

Artist's perspective.

Click

FYP

[Robototron]

I never got an invite code, so fuck 'em and fuck all you. Also, I don't get what the big problem is. www.isohunt.com www.mininova.com

You can't really compare OiNK to public trackers. Like, not even close. Demonoid maybe, since it practically is one, but OiNK was on a whole other level.

[matsuolost]

yeah oink was incredible
i remember when i had an act there 2 years a go and my ratio sucked so they kicked me out

[DeltaSigChi4]

Same community, different angry artist:

theres no fancy talking your way out of the fact that unlicensed downloads are theft.

end of story.

if a band WANTS to give it away-no problem have fun. But there are COPYRIGHT and USAGE LAWS IN PLACE that say if the band or WHOEVER owns those rights wants to get paid they are suppossed to.

Another post by the same person:

the solution is PAY FOR YOUR FUCKING ENTERTAINMENT.

And:

Ok spend a few million as a small label in the hopes of getting 1 release that sells more than 500 units and then rethink your argument.

E

[DeltaSigChi4]

If the Decemberists or another shitty band wants to give away their music for free, then take it. Who gives a fuck. But NOT ALL BANDS WANTS TO GIVE AWAY THEIR MUSIC AWAY FOR FREE. And everyone who illegally downloads wants to justify their theft by proclaiming that bands have learned to deal with it and blah blah blah.

I'm fairly certain that supermarkets have learned to deal with shoplifting as well. Maybe I should go down the street and stuff several loafs of bread down my pants.

E

[luckyface]

While I hate to agree with Delta, I kind of agree. However you justify it, what was going down on Oink was copyright theft.

Personally, I don't care if other people do it and I always like when bands say they don't mind that their music is being grabbed online. I believe there is definitely benefits to giving people access to music for free. But to those who pass this community off as noble or something is kind of absurd to me.