A beneficially blurred line of regulation became somewhat firmly re-established last Tuesday, to the chagrin of many avid music downloaders. One of the most prestigious and revered sources for BitTorrent filesharing, Oink's Pink Palace, was shut down by Interpol. Its sole proprietor, a 24-year-old British man named Alan Ellis, was also arrested on charges including copyright infringement for his operation of the site.
An ongoing investigation will officially determine, among other things, whether he was profiting greatly from the site's optional donations (he wasn't) and whether the site's users will feel any repercussions (probably not).
This whole thing caught a lot of people off guard, since the use of BitTorrent technology for music filesharing has seemed brilliantly foolproof up to this point. BitTorrent has been around for a number of years as a method for efficient data transfer with a wide array of uses and reached the mainstream consciousness, perhaps most significantly a few years back, as a viable source for trading music and films.
Essentially, it places no blame"" on any one distributor for offering up a given file/folder, instead drawing it from multiple sources - other users who have already downloaded some or all of the file in the same manner.
Oink, which also offered software and other types of files, was a BitTorrent tracker, in that it assisted the correspondence between users, but did not distribute anything directly, and its elusive role was therefore thought to be completely legal. In Ellis' words, comparing Oink to Google: ""I don't sell music to people, I just direct them to it.""
With the use of BitTorrent, it seemed as though a method of downloading had been discovered that couldn't help but slip through the cracks, a perfect capitalization on the anonymity of the internet age in which no one was at fault. Inevitably though, the powerlessness of the RIAA and their cohorts in this matter must have confounded their sensibilities to a boiling point, and someone was bound to take the rap.
What attracted the long and increasingly malleable arm of the law to Ellis and his Oink operation, and substantiated its claims on it over all of the BitTorrent websites around, were actually two of its best qualities: it's relative exclusivity and its offering of new releases in high quality formats.
Admittedly, it was probably most of all that these ""new releases"" were often in fact not-yet releases, available in full on Oink long before their street date, so it's understandable that record companies might not be too happy. But it's not exactly as though a leaked album is a new concept or danger (depending on your vantage point), or anything endemic to just Oink; it's a universal issue with any filesharing program.
Above all, Oink was a community whose success was based on users' willingness to give and take, and whose membership was based on users' accrued contributions resulting in the ability to invite friends to the site. It was something of an ideal atmosphere: a population of nearly 200,000 balanced equally with musicians and fans, professionals and amateurs, dabblers and aficionados and everything in between. The vast, all-encompassing library it offered promoted full albums over singles, and the nature of BitTorrent allowed for high quality control and large file sizes.
In other words, it answered the questionable nature of the internet as a source for music - something I've been talking about here and there during the last few weeks - by providing a place that offered a vast selection of free music, required little compromise and seemed immune to repercussion. It's a shame to see that it wasn't immune after all, and that its demise might signify future problems for other sites engaged in similar activity.
Dismayed by Oink's downfall? Seek encouragement, counsel and wisdom from Ben at bpeterson1@wisc.edu.
