p2pnet news | Music:- I apologise.

At least one element of the lamscream media is asking embarrassing questions about the OiNK farce.

The main one is, of course, how did Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG their BPI manage to get senior British cops to willingly allow their already hard-pressed officers to be used as unpaid corporate copyright cops?

But the Guardian Unlimited’s Bobbie Johnson also has a few other concerns and as one of his readers says:

It’s a shame that the vast majority of media outlets swallowed the IFPA’s press release hook line and sinker. The BBC report was practically cut and pasted from it.

True. It was. Check it out. How was that allowed to happen? You’d expect that from some of the lesser organs, but the Beeb?

However, as I say here, an even more interesting question is: Why are purely commercial corporate concerns, whose only responsibility is to their shareholders, allowed to use national and international police and enforcement agencies paid for by local taxpayers on purely commercial business?

Media accounts say this ‘operation’ was underway for two years and even involved Interpol.

It’d be extremely interesting to see an accurate account, or even an estimate, of exactly how many officers, how many man-hours and how many million pounds and Euros were squandered in Holland and the UK on this farce on behalf of Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US).”

I’ve asked the same question many times before with respect to other so-called ‘operations’, but it’s never raised, let alone answered, in the supposedly impartial mainstream media.

‘Is everything that’s being reported about Oink accurate?’

Meanwhile, says Johnson, “The media has parroted the police line on torrent tracker Oink. But – for now at least – the legal situation seems far from clear cut.”

He goes on >>>

But, is everything that’s being reported about Oink accurate? Certainly the details seem far less clear today than they did yesterday: for a start, the 24-year-old man arrested in Middlesbrough has been released, so far without charge.

As I tried to reflect in our report, not everything that has been parroted by the media in relation to the case seems entirely correct: for example, the implication that Oink was a subscription service is not true. It was private and, like many other sites, accepted donations from users, but – as most web entrepreneurs will tell you – that hardly ever covers your true costs.

Nor is the idea that it was primarily used to share pre-release music entirely accurate. Oink users have been in touch to say that there was a proportion of pre-release music around (which, by definition, must often come from people inside the recording industry) but that it was not the primary aim of those sharing on Oink.

Where Oink was different to some services was that it required you to upload a certain ratio of material in order to be able to download. This is great news for the UK record industry, which has been more aggressive towards uploaders of music than those who simply leech. But otherwise, the status of tracker websites seems untested in the courts.

A spokesman for the IFPI told me yesterday that Oink was “obviously a standard infringement of UK copyright law” – but it strikes me that the law here is far from obvious; not least because few, if any, filesharing cases ever make it through the legal process.

Dogmatique, the Guardian Unlimited reader quoted earlier, also says:

Yes, this evil hub of international piracy which was sooo lucrative the Kingpin, “Alan” was still working full time and living in a one bedroom ground floor flat in Middlesborogh.

No-where was it mentioned that the website hosted not a single audio file and that all content was provided by users.

It’s also worth pointing out that a great many of the 208,000 unique uploads on the site were records that were long out of print, back-catalogue or just plain forgotten by the record labels who just can’t be bothered to keep the majority of their recordings on the shelves.

Unlike Oink which was populated by many music obsessives who shared their rare collections with like minded souls.

And, posts franglais

Here’s a good example of what others here saying about the great selection of music vs The Industry:

My wife asked me to download a hard-to-find CD of a relatively well know “indie” singer. Voila, I found it on OiNK! She liked it so much, she said she’d like the actual CD for her birthday. I strolled down to my local “indie” record store here in Paris. Guess what?! It closed down!

I went to another local used book/record store, asked the guy if he could order it for me, he told me he couldn’t, he only deals with used stuff. Asked him where a good independently operated record is, he looked at me as if I was from Mars, and said, “they’re all closed monsieur! There are no more “local record stores! You’ll have to go to FNAC or Virgin!”

Went to FNAC, asked the paid help about this CD I was looking for, and she’s all, “hunh?!” Of course they didn’t have it.

It could be argued that “we” closed down the indie shops by stopping at OiNK (and the likes) instead, but then go to San Fran or Berkley in California, and you’ll see that the local shops are alive and well, simply by not giving in to Big Music.

And says Jay on p2pnet:

I guess they ran out of terrorists to look for in the UK. I know a lot of bands that used Oink as a way to help get their music out. I also know of a few people that worked at music labels that had over 100GB uploaded and downloaded.

Oink had music on there that you could not find anywhere else. I used it for hard to find indie bands where sometimes the only way to get there cd was to go to a show and the chances Id be able to go to one is like 0%.

Prerelease cds are uploaded everywhere else not just Oink. That video pisses me off because of all the false statements. You dont have to pay to join and no music was ever uploaded to teh site. Funny how they raided the place in Amsterdam to get the servers. I guess pot and prostitution are legal but heaven forbid you host .torrent files on a server.

OiNK is offline not because crime or offence was shown to have been committed.

It’s down purely because following unproven Big 4 allegations, and thanks to “a criminal investigation by IFPI, BPI, Cleveland Police and the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police (FIOD ECD)” it was merely “suspected” of some kind of illusory involvement in “illegal music distribution”.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

Slashdot it!

Also See:
OiNK farce – Big Music’s OiNK farce rolls on, October 24, 2007
Guardian Unlimited – Time to clear up the murk about Oink, October 24, 2007
Check it out – OiNK bust on video, October 23, 2007

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 9:08 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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