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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.
Jealous much?
What of it? Oink was his business, good for him for making a profit off of it.
Yeah...but he didn't have to be a pig about it and hog all the money.
[ba dum tsh]
Thank you! I'll be here all night. Try the pork!
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?
The cost of the hardware is hardly worth mentioning... this little enterprise is about bandwidth. A few grand a month can easily be spent on just a T1.
You do understand that bittorrent tracker itself doesn't burn bandwidth almost at all, but its extremely heavy on the server because so many hits are coming in all the time?
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?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Pretty sure when I quoted the article originally it said £18,000, but it's now saying $18,000, which is £11,000.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I actually don't care one way or another, I was just being a smartass. I'm usually pretty good at it.
Sent from your iPad.
Making 500k for helping other people share material under copyright? Yea, jealous of the sum, but not of the method, shows a lot about his ethics.
What exactly does the public library do? Which ethics do public libraries support?
Are you suggesting that we sue libraries out of existence for helping other people access material under copyright?
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
The Authors Guild probably would sue libraries if they didn't already have hundreds of years of history behind them. The only reason online sharing of books is illegal is because it's a new concept. The Boston Public Library is allowed to exist, but bostonlibrary.com is not.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Profit?
That's an awfully big assumption. Sure he collected $34,000 from donations but if his online billing/expenses were $40,000 then he's not really getting rich, is he?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"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?
A local lending library does not have and never has had the ability to reproduce a single book for as many people as want it at no significant cost to themselves.
Hence libraries have never had the capacity to threaten the actual profitability of a book that much. See - there's a difference for you.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Nobody's proven that filesharing has the "capacity to threaten the actual profitability of a book that much" either.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Meh. That was boaring, hamfisted attempt.
How could you have missed that he really brought home the bacon?
Were you just spamming puns?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Slight difference: public libraries buy the books they loan out. This particular sleazebag didn't buy anything in order to "earn" £18,000 a month. He deserved a hefty fine and at least a suspended sentence.
Well. No one can point to a law that he broke soooo...
He did not do anything to Earn a fine. Unless you are just pissed that a guy found out how to make shitloads of cash for very little effort. In fact from looking at your post it would seem that is is the fact that he made a lot of money for no effort that pissed you off. What a sad life you must live.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It's like trying to make water not wet. Bits are easily copied. That's a plain and simple fact. Trying to pretend otherwise is stupid. What is stupid about the business is that they are trying to treat those bits as if they were scarce, just like they do with paper books. The problem is that physical goods ARE scarce. Sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "people are taking all my BITS!" is just pissing into the wind. Build a windmill instead of complaining about how all your paper hats are blowing away.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
sticking with the book idea; a list of things to make money on that are not the physical book
1) Movie rights
2) Signed physical copies
3) Posters, action figures, scarves, etc.
4) Speaking events.
5) something else i didn't think of in the last 3 minutes.
so no the [e]Book need not be your only source of income. see mike masnicks CWF+RTB stuff for more examples.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
If a poor kid borrows books from a library those are not lost sales--the kid didn't have money for the books anyway. No sales are lost.
And note that this was one of the primary reasons that public libraries were established. The intent was to bring books to "the masses" who mostly had no access to any sort of literature. The publishers weren't happy with the idea at the time, though they eventually learned to live with it. In the long run, a literate population that liked to read was in the publishers' long-term interest.
It's not hard to see the same anti-educational view in the objections to internet sharing. There's a strong sense that what publishers want is an end to my access to anything that I haven't first paid for. Of course, this means that I'd have no way of judging beforehand whether I want to read (or view or listen to) something; I'd just have to buy it, and in the 99% case that I don't actually like it, I can discard it. They're not just against my getting information on authors, musicians, etc. from a public library. They want an end to all sharing among friends or acquaintances, so we'd have no way of knowing if we like something without first paying for it.
Maybe we need to be bringing up the public libraries more in the growing debates over "sharing" online. It would benefit us all (and probably the producers, too), if there were an open and legal online equivalent to public libraries. Also, we should try to make it clear that introducing friends to things we like by sharing is still as legal as it was a few decades ago. Otherwise we'll lose a lot of what the supporters of public libraries and the "public domain" fought to establish in past centuries.
We don't really want to go back to the day when most of the public was intentionally kept illiterate and ignorant of most "culture". And we don't want to go forward to a system in which we can never discover whether we like something unless we've first paid for it. This is what the publishers and recording companies are pushing for.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I thought the windmill metaphor was an excellent one.
I also disagree with your contention that pirates live off the rest of us. You don't pay any more as a result of someone else not paying. You already pay as much as the content producers think they can gouge out of you, and far more than the product is actually worth because its price is artificially inflated through corrupt legislation.
Or perhaps you think that someone should be earning millions a year for a piece of work they did 45 years ago, and that it's criminal to expect them to actually do some more work if they want to earn more money. Me, I find myself short on sympathy.