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

Re:Spin

[Anonymous Coward]

Jealous much?

Re:Spin

[D Ninja]

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!

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?

Re:money

[corbettw]

Depends. Does the UK have civil asset forfeiture? Because in the US, that money would be found guilty and no one would ever see it again.

That's right, money can be guilty in the US if it associates with other money to a sum of $10,000 or more (or less, really, if the authorities really want it). Land of the free, my ass.

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?

[nxtw]

I do not know exactly how oink works (worked?)

It was a private BitTorrent tracker. The torrent files (containing the hashes) were generated by users and uploaded to the site. OiNK tracked the torrents and provided search for its torrents.

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.

Re:Implications for torrent sites?

[owlnation]

UK government has much more clout against US pressure.

No, I think it's very much the opposite really. Regardless the Labour Party, the ruling junta of the UK, are very committed to the music industry. Many of their backers are from the music industry (and they need every penny right now, they are about to fight an election they can't win, and are near bankrupt). The UK has explored many different ways of dealing with filesharing, and is pretty much committed to a zero tolerance stance.

Fortunately the UK judges may be more wise in this instance that the braindead, thieving cretins who rule the UK.

In Sweden, what ever the laws are, the main issue seemed to be that the judge trying the Pirate Bay was corrupt, and in the pay of a Music Industry pressure group.

However, the reason why that judge may have been selected, the core issue with the Pirate Bay, was that they were, quite literally, asking for it. They taunted and mocked the music industry and the Swedish Justice system. It was only a question of time before someone was going to get them for something. As entertaining as they were, their approach to the situation was astonishingly naive, and guaranteed to get them jail time.

Small correction

[krou]

Pretty sure when I quoted the article originally it said £18,000, but it's now saying $18,000, which is £11,000.

Re:Spin

[commodore64_love]

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.

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.

Re:Spin

[jc42]

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.