In UK, Oink Admin Cleared of Fraud

krou writes "The BBC is reporting that Alan Ellis, who ran music file sharing site Oink from his flat in the UK, has been found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud. Between 2004 and 2007, the site 'facilitated the download of 21 million music files' by allowing its some 200,000 'members to find other people on the web who were prepared to share files.' Ellis was making £18,000 a month ($34,600) from donations from users, and claimed that he had no intention of defrauding copyright holders, and said 'All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.'" Reader Andorin recommends Torrentfreak's coverage, which includes summaries of the closing arguments.

Comments

money

[Nadaka]

The big question is...
Now that he has been found innocent, does he get his 300k back?
Or am I mistaken in assuming that his assets were seized?

Implications for torrent sites?

[WowTIP]

I do not know exactly how oink works (worked?), but from the quote

All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.

Wouldn't that make exactly the same defence valid for Pirate Bay and other torrent sites?

Re:Implications for torrent sites?

[mariushm]

The tracker functionality can also be compared to a DNS server...

Just query [32 char hash key].trackerdomain.com, the DNS returns the IP of one of the seeders, you connect to that IP and retrieve from that seeder a list of peers and seeders. Query same domain after a minute, you get another IP, which gives you another subset of seeders and peers and so on.

A tracker is really the same thing with a DNS server - you let a member add host records and you keep his domain but you're not responsible for the content of the subdomains it creates.

If someone creates a subdomain to his domain called "prodigy", it doesn't mean that person will sell or distribute Prodigy cd's or mp3 files from that subdomain, and the dns server owner doesn't have the content in his control, just like a tracker doesn't store the content of the files.

Strange route to take...

[91degrees]

"Conspiracy to defraud"

Defrauding seems a bit of an odd charge to lay for this. It suggests that he was taking wealth from the record industry for direct personal gain.

The money cam from subscribers. They were not making any money from the file sharing. Even if he had a website that was explicitly dedicated to getting people in contact to fence actually stolen property I'd have thought this would be hard to make stick.

Doesn't UK law have anything along the lines of conspiracy to facilitate copyright infringement?

Re:Spin

[PopeRatzo]

Hence libraries have never had the capacity to threaten the actual profitability of a book that much.

Nobody's proven that filesharing has the "capacity to threaten the actual profitability of a book that much" either.