Thursday, October 25, 2007

More bad news

The only torrent in my world at the moment is the one that's coming down outside my window here in Brisbane. OiNK's Pink Palace, an invite only bittorrent website that gave access to thousands of albums often months before their actual release, has been shut down:

"Oink's Pink Palace (frequently written as OiNK) was a prominent BitTorrent tracker located at Oink.cd, previously Oink.me.uk. On October 23, 2007 it was shut down by Interpol, IFPI, BPI, and other organizations.

The site was an invitation-only BitTorrent community, with a membership of around 180,000[2] members at the time of closure; though only around 80,000 were regularly active. It was mainly oriented around sharing music albums in quality controlled MP3 and FLAC formats (along with most other formats such as OGG and M4A), but also offered other files such as e-books, software and e-learning videos.

Jeremy Banks, head of the IFPI's Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, has stated that OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music, leaking more than 60 major album releases in 2007 alone. Users of the site have contested this, claiming that most leaks originate from the private FTP servers of the scene, which then trickle down to other forms of distribution, with OiNK being higher up on the ladder than most sites on the internet, due to its reputation among file-sharers. Many users agree that the leaks would still be distributed at various other sites if OiNK did not exist.
"


In a way, it's surprising that this didn't happen earlier. What is surprising, is that when i try to logon to the much smaller (and harder to get invited onto) Indietorrents.com, it's no longer there. A cautionary measure, perhaps; laying low while all this OiNK stuff blows over(?). But technically, Indietorrents (which I download on average a couple of albums per day from) shouldn't have anything to worry about. User's are banned from uploading anything that is on a record label monitored by the RIAA (one of the organisations to shut down OiNK) so as not to stir the powers that be. So it may come back up and I'm free again to selfishly steal albums. Hmpf. It all reminds me of when Napster got shut down. That seemed like a fairly complex law case, but it got put up again. I wonder how long Soulseek will hang around for? Maybe I'll go back to the good old days of leafing through musty record sleeves in an actual *store*.

OiNK founder sez 'We're just like Google'. He's right, too.

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