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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.
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!
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"
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.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"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?
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.