While I will not discuss the inner workings of Oink. I do think its appropriate to post that currently there is a fund going to try and save the admin through his legal battle. Please check it out. http://saveoink.com/
If any one wants the gory details. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/25/ninternet125.xml That a bit like a saying a Gun shop is guilty of murdering people before buying a gun and going on a shooting rampage... Anyway it's a lot more harder to find anything to download via google, the best you are going to get is some sites that will or more often a site that says music sharing is bad or a porn site that has a ton of useless tags in the metadata.
I've noticed if you google bandname + blogspot, you get rapidshare links, which is kind of goofy, but thats how I get demos and unreleased stuff of bands you can't get on CD.
The guy doesn't need saving - as far as I was aware he did rake in a fair deal from advertising (a bit like Pirate Bay). But I might be wrong, so don't quote me.
It's a popular music torrent site. I don't personally use it, but I've heard you can really find some music there that you can no longer buy or get anywhere else on the internet. I've read the guy's blog, and it seems he doesn't make any money off the site. He just needs money for the legal fund. Seems pretty honest and right to me - if the users want to site to survive, they can donate to the legal fund and help Oink fight in a court. It's beneficial for both sides.
This isn't about warez this is about the fact that after all this, its not this guys fault. Hell musicians have even admitted to have used Oink! Indeed millions of people used the torrent site. So why should this one guy have his life destroyed. Its more like there trying to use him as an example more then really do proper justice.
Oh stop making him sound like Robin Hood, the guy hosted it, keep illegal music on servers based in the UK and Europe so the guy is a total idiot. His defence is "Well you can find illegal music on Google too", except google don't host illegal files and unlike oink it's a general search engine so will find everything that it is allowed to. I'm sure with google you could find things like child pornography but google itself doesn't have any of the said material and it is not it's only reason to exist. If oink.cd was a child porn sharing website then I am sure people would be laughing at his excuses. I hope this guy gets a prison sentence just for being an idiot with a large piehole.
Actually both Google and Oink don't host the files then. Only torrents are hosted. The files are on members computers. So really his defence isn't that bad.
The guy is from my home town. Says it all really. Boro is full of chavs & scumbags. However, Oink was a superb site for music :thumbsup:
It was an AWESOME site for music. There were no ads on the site, he wasn't making any money or if he was it went into the bandwidth. It had standards that many sites lack not to mention stuff that's impossible to find.
remember the last time a p2p/torrent guy asked for donations for "legal fees"? incase you forgot or have no idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LokiTorrent my 3 cents if you cant do the time dont do the crime.
Last I checked, Oink did not keep any music on it's servers... Are you sure you understand how torrents work?
It also had warez and eBooks among a couple of other things. That might have contributed to the whole mess. But right, it's all torrents.
Except it also sucks in the respect that he set up the site with both the full intention and full knowledge of the illegality of the content he was linking to (which is where all these cases are lost due to a stipulation exactly for that), unlike Google who are covered because their system does not differentiate between legal and illegal content (and as such, they are not liable for copyright infringement as their services are not advertised as promoting illegality). I also found out that OiNK ran on donations to keep the servers running - and as such anyone who donated is more culpable in court than someone who purely downloaded/uploaded - although my understanding is the fool didn't administer any encryption, so log data can be freely read by the authorities, and as such they can hunt people down fairly easily.
