Ames Progressive

The record industry claimed its latest victim in its ongoing struggle against Internet music piracy on October 23. Interpol, working in tandem with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and British Phonographic Industry (BPI), seized the domain of OiNK’s Pink Palace, the Web’s premiere private peer-to-peer BitTorrent tracker music filesharing site, and placed a warning that investigation into activities of the site’s approximated 180,000 members might occur. British authorities arrested the site’s 24-year-old administrator, Alan Ellis, and in Amsterdam, Dutch police confiscated the site’s hosting service’s servers. Media coverage of the event largely mirrored police reports of the incident, which included innacurate information that the site primarily distributed leaked pre-release albums and falsely implied that members had to make donations which went into the pockets of Ellis to ensure continued memberships.

Ellis, accused of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law, argued he had done no wrong, as peer-to-peer networks are not inherently illegal and none of the copyright-infringing materials were hosted on his servers, but rather on individual users’ home computers. Donations, he said, were used legitimately to cover server costs. Ellis was reportedly released without charges and the oink.cd domain was promptly returned to his possession. It remains unclear what the legal ramifications of the seizure may ultimately entail, but already two new invite-only sites, waffles.fm and what.cd, are trying to fill the OiNK void. And the notorious thepiratebay.org, which created the International Federation of Pirates Interests at ifpi.com to mock the IFPI, has plans to create a public tracker site, BOiNK.

In a recent interview with spoken word artist Saul Williams and Nine Inch Nails’s frontman Trent Reznor on New York Magazine’s Vulture entertainment blog, Reznor revealed that he had been a member of OiNK. Williams and Reznor recently released a collaborative album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! Like Radiohead’s pay-what-you-choose-or-pay-nothing approach to its new In Rainbows album, Williams and Reznor are providing their album for free or an optional $5 donation on the album’s Web site.

Read the Williams/Reznor interview at: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/10/trent_reznor_and_saul_williams.html.

Download the NiggyTardust! album at: http://niggytardust.com/ and In Rainbows at: http://www.inrainbows.com/.

For more information on OiNK and the filesharing movement visit http://oink.cd/ and http://torrentfreak.com/.