OINK Probs???

from the faq:

What's all this stuff about ratio?

This is a music sharing site. One simple way to display how much you're sharing is with the share ratio. Before doing that, let's talk about two terms: Uploading is when you send data to others, downloading is when you receive data. Your share ratio is the amount you've uploaded divided by amount downloaded (Ratio = UL / DL). A good ratio is 1.0 or higher, which means that you've shared back as much or more than you received. If you don't keep a good ratio it could result in you losing your account. To try and keep a good ratio you can:

* Make sure you seed (don't close the torrent after it has finished downloading).
* Try and find a new torrent that will be popular. If you download it early all the other people that download it after you will be able to download from you.
* Stop downloading for a while.
* If possible leave your computer on and torrents open continuously. This way you can improve your ratio even while not using your computer.

so did i miss an announcement about the site going down for maintenance or is something really wrong? been down about a whole day, i think...

via whois:

Registration status:
Registered until renewal date.
*** This registration has been SUSPENDED. ***

Oh SNAP!

Oink Invites (new application process!!!1)

2007-06-29 - DNS Problems

We apologize for the continuing DNS problems. You can get around this by adding our hostnames directly to your hosts file. Add the following lines to your \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file (the number of spaces between the IP and the name doesn't matter as long as there's at least one space (or tab):

85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.71 oink.me.uk

Do you pick your nose?

No

Yes, but only in private

Yes, in public

Blank Vote (a.k.a. "I just want to see the results")

I had to do that fix last month. Been working fine ever since. Not that I really use it much.

and i finally figured out how to be "clever" :(

yeah, what the fuck does "clever" mean?

cool. thanks for that, gr8080.

i would also like to know what the fuck "clever" means

"Clever" means your router port is open. If it's closed, you can connect to the main seeder, but can't share with others (or something like that). Open ports means higher sharing ratio in the long run.

ah, that explains that. i thought it had something to do with having a port open, but i'd just never heard it referred to as "clever." not that i would know.

oh...so i guess i've been clever right from the start.

2007-06-29 - DNS Problems

We apologize for the continuing DNS problems. You can get around this by adding our hostnames directly to your hosts file. Add the following lines to your \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file (the number of spaces between the IP and the name doesn't matter as long as there's at least one space (or tab):

85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.71 oink.me.uk

what if you're using a mac?

ah, I was finally able to get back on the site, and saw this in the forums:

"Temporary fix for Mac OS X, it requires some work in the Terminal. You need the admin password for your system for this. Make sure to enter all commands in bold correctly with the proper spaces and capitalization.

1. Open "Terminal" from your Applications / Utilities directory.

2. Type cd /private/etc and hit enter.

3. Time to edit the hosts file, we will use VIM for it, which is a text editor for the console. You also need root privileges to edit the file because it is read only for normal users.
Type sudo vim hosts and hit enter. You will be asked for your admin password, enter it and hit enter, then VIM pops up.

4. You will see the content of the hosts file, first few lines are comments with # in the front, then 3 entries, do NOT touch these. Navigate to the last line with your cursor keys and then to the right till the cursor is behind the localhost entry

5. Now you need VIM to go into edit mode, do this by hitting i

6. VIM is in insert mode now, hit enter for a new line and type
85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.me.uk

If you want you can add the following lines too, in case you encounter trouble with IRC or the website. Hit enter after each line for a new one
85.17.40.71 oink.me.uk
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.me.uk

7. Time to leave edit mode now, do so by hitting the escape key.

8. Back in viewing mode, now you need to save the file. You can do this by typing :w and hitting enter, VIM will tell you something like "hosts (number of lines) written".

9. Now you need to exit VIM. Type :q and hit enter, you will be back at the terminal.

10. Almost done, now you need to tell the OS to use the content of the new hosts file.
Type sudo niload -v -m hosts . < /etc/hosts and hit enter.
You will be asked for the admin password again, after that the hosts file will be parsed.

11. You're done, exit the terminal by typing exit and hit enter. Close the window.

Edit: To remove them again - follow the same steps, in step 6 delete the 3 added lines, then save the file, quit the editor. You can then either run step 10 or wait until your next reboot."

After step 3, I get "(my acct name)is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported."

Anyone know wtf?!

You have been banned from OiNK 30 days. You will be able to complete step three at the end of those 30 days.

If you aren't an administrator on yr Mac, you will be unable to sudo. Open System Preferences -> Accounts, and make sure that "Allow user to administer this computer" is checked under yr account.

The latter of these two comments was helpful. Thanks! (the first I suspect to be an amusing little jokelet).

new steely dan leaked

oh, also, if you've never saved something in your HOSTS file, all you need to do is open it with Notepad, paste the:

85.17.40.69 tracker.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.70 irc.oink.me.uk
85.17.40.71 oink.me.uk

in there somewhere and save it.

hahah is that all.

internet conniption averted.

i just leaked

just stopped working for me again, even with the host file info.

same here

ditto

I was kicked off for bad ratio. I got a new account, because it's so much easier (and there's so much more) than soulseek. It's tough keeping up a ratio though, because I very rarely have stuff with a good enough bitrate that isn't already uploaded. Although when my account went down, some rare Intersystems stuff left and the entire Oink community was the worse for it.

(and there's so much more) than soulseek

haha no

you don't have to upload new "stuff" to get keep your ratio up

Anyone know what's going on with Oink this weekend? I get the message "oink.me.uk could not be found. Please check the name and try again" Is that the above mentioned "DSN" problem or something else entirely? Hope it comes back soon!

I was kicked off for bad ratio. I got a new account, because it's so much easier (and there's so much more) than soulseek. It's tough keeping up a ratio though, because I very rarely have stuff with a good enough bitrate that isn't already uploaded. Although when my account went down, some rare Intersystems stuff left and the entire Oink community was the worse for it.

to everything you said: NO

Is that the above mentioned "DSN" problem or something else entirely?

It's the DNS issue. Do what it says upthread and it should work fine - or at least, it did me.

Thanks Wayward Johnny B! I also just read this:
http://torrentfreak.com/oink-is-alive-learn-how-to-access/
and that had some insight into the problem as well. Cheers.

new domain: oink.cd

New domain, and make sure to re-download your old torrents from the new site.

They got raided last night, I am hearing on the radio. :/

where were the servers located? the uk?

Yep.

So can oink users be sued or anything now they have access to email addresses and shit?

http://www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/display.var.1779471.0.police_swoop_to_close_down_illegal_website.php

So, servers in Netherlands, rather.

http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20071023.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/7057812.stm

Can they go after people for just being members of the site?

So what kind of oink googlers are we going to get in future, then?

Oink RIP I guess

invite?

TV Links got busted yesterday as well.

;__;

http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3454/cryingeagle8oqil3.jpg

http://image.blingee.com/images14/content/output/2007/10/23/251737193_4b375d33.gif

OMG!

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/10_01/NetPedoR_468x331.jpg

Can they go after people for just being members of the site?

No, that's not of itself an offense anywhere I understand copyright law. But presumably most of the people who were members were also illegally violating copyright (boo! hiss!) Who knows what kind of logs they've got from the server in Amsterdam.

So where are we getting our music from now then? I've not gotta go back to fucking Soulseek have I?

Bah. Record companies should PAY these guys for promoting new music way more than most of their own promotional departments.

But no, they still stand by their old "prerelease music is teh evil" - guys, shutting down this one site is only going to help temporarily, because it doesn't address the underlying problem.

;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_; ;_;

o where are we getting our music from now then? I've not gotta go back to fucking Soulseek have I?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/tx/media/pa_hmv_front_203.jpg

Both Oink and the IFPI are idiots.

fuck where am i going to get leopard from. d3m0n01d next?

I am seriously gutted about TVLinks.

You'll be able to get Leopard from Pirate Bay if you're not on any of the invite-only Mac trackers.

"first they came for belly button ring, and i said nothing..."

Have there been any cases yet where authorities have gone after bittorrent seeders, as well as site operators?

http://blog.orgday.org/wp-content/images/misc/oink_sm.jpg

Hey there Pink Palace
I know times are getting hard
But just believe me, girl
Someday I'll pay the bills with this guitar
We'll have it good
We'll have the life we knew we would
My word is good

Hey there Pink Palace
I've got so much left to say
If every simple song I wrote to you
Would take your breath away
I'd write it all
Even more in love with me you'd fall
We'd have it all

Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
What you do to me

http://blog.orgday.org/wp-content/images/misc/oink_sm.jpg

"first they came for belly button ring, and i said nothing..."

-- ^@^, Tuesday, 23 October 2007 12:56 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

OMG MP!

haha

hey pash, your presence is requested on I LOVE TO RIDE MY BICYCLE board

http://i21.tinypic.com/24ne88n.jpg

Dammit. The cops are going on about how it was "hugely lucrative", too.

see, there's a lesson there, stet.

i hope karagarga doesn't go. i didn't really care about oink.

The BBC seem to have taken out that earlier guff about how users had to pay to maintain their memembership, though. The IFPI line about "users "only (being) invited to join the site if they could prove that they had music to offer" is rubbish too.

yah i never uploaded anything there

right, they had to post picture of cat power

xp

They also fail to mention that they frequently took bad prereleases off at artists' request.

why would they mention that?

that doesnt really make it any more of a moral gray area dude

they also fail to mention how it used to be so awesome that you could download entire label discographies

life changing event, peoples

"Justify My OINK"

they forgot to mention how sad theyre making everyone

i don't swallow that at all - do you mean artists would rather have a 320kb prerelease than a shitty 160kb one? how could that be?

xxposts to myself

LOL at jhøshea

xxxx-post
but then half the albums in the discography would be badly-tagged and 128kbps

RIP many hours spent wishing for a hard drive w/ space on it

Jed - I think they mean artists are unhappy at unfinished mixes (not low bitrate versions) of stuff circulating. Though that seems a bogus point to make in reference to oink, as I don't think unfinished mixes were allowed under the site's strict quality rules anyway (I might be wrong on this).

It's kind of weird that servers were seized last week but stayed in operation till this morning.

COLLECTING EVIDENCE. I wonder if the Teesside dude knew they'd been seized.

tvlinks NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

FUCK an everyone.

is the thing about the servers being taken last week necessarily true, given the other inaccuracies? you kinda think the admins would have noticed!

i guess i'm glad my account was about to be deleted due to my bad ratio

my bank account that is

yeah, that's the ticket

vote this up batches:
http://reddit.com/info/5yxe9/comments

What was the minimum bitrate on Oink?

indietorrents.com will probably be of interest to a lot of people here, but they ban discographies and anything released on an RIAA radar.

I don't get the point of indietorrents. Well, I do, I just don't really agree with it. It just seems that by eliminating the RIAA stuff and focusing on more "under the radar" stuff, they are encouraging people to rip-off artists that probably need the money more than the major label guys.

Yeah, I generally agree. The thing I object to is the way they try to make out that this choice is to support the little guy rather than something they've done to reduce the chance of litigation from people who can afford it. The truth is that they probably believe that it is genuinely a bit of both.

I run a label and I deliberately put one of our albums on there just to see what would happen. What happened was someone saw it as permission to put up another of our albums, but we haven't gotten any attributable sales yet. Hmm.

p.s. my brother on Oink: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/23/oink_raids/

back to soulseek, nothing to see here

alba, i get it but i'm still not swallowing that a band or label would complain about a bad rip being on oink, and ask for its removal but disregard the fact that the entire rest of their discography is up there at 320 or flac

I think the removal requests for advances were mostly for stuff that was so advanced it wasn't finished.

see, there's a lesson there, stet.
Is the lesson that somebody's always getting rich, or that the cops talk crap?

i hope karagarga doesn't go. i didn't really care about oink.

OTM

life changing event, peoples

-- cutty, Tuesday, 23 October 2007 14:21 (35 minutes ago) Link

If the charges are "conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law." I wonder how that's going to play in UK courts. Has anyone been done for running a tracker here?

so helpless...

the earlier page warning has been replaced with this:

This site has been closed as a result of a criminal investigation by IFPI, BPI,
Cleveland Police and the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police (FIOD ECD) into
suspected illegal music distribution.

A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site's
users

i mean, an hour or so ago, it just said something along the lines that the site could not be reached.

Has anyone been done for running a tracker here?

They're planning on running this as a test case, maybe?

lawl

http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c90/gradygillan/oinkiloveu.jpg

A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site's
users

:(

im not a user but ... yikes

um...what does this mean? hypothetically

http://www.spin.com/features/magazine/images/2007/07/leakgraphic_800.jpg

http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Desnoyers-JeanPaulChoppart/pages/010-beating-the-boy/010-beating-the-boy-q75-380x500.jpg

Actually, I think this is what happens except in Sweden:

http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Gallonio-TorturesAndTorments/pages/003-Suspended-by-the-thumbs/

http://i23.tinypic.com/2093qfq.gif

i'm so bummed i haven't laughed at this thread at all, but that is funny.

all i know is that i'm stocking up on guns and pepperidge farm goldfish

lololol @ jhoshea's gif

OMG they're going to sue 180,000!

i knew it was a joke but did ctrl+f 'oink' on that page just in case u_u

Damn I wonder how wise it was for, um, someone I know, to spend all that time seeding 4d0be stuff just to get his or her ratio up. They're pretty litigious, those guys.

come and get me redcoats

They won't have to. This is already an Interpol operation. Data will be with US authorities soon, I'm sure.

"They won't have to. This is already an Interpol operation. Data will be with US authorities soon, I'm sure."

What exactly does this mean?

http://www.zeropaid.com/bbs/archive/index.php/t-45782.html

lol i think i mightve seeded cs3 for quite a while myself

Confounded, hold me...

on April 1st UK-T played a hi-larious joke by replacing their homepage with a message not unlike the one now on OiNK. the forums after the scam had been revealed were hysterical - people had been absolutely shitting themselves, and a lot of them didn't find it very funny. with this now, I'm thinking hard drives are getting burned by the dozen.

What exactly does this mean?

Presumably US authorities (and those elsewhere) will be interested in the data recovered from the servers in Amsterdam. The operation to shut down Oink is already inter-force and involves Interpol so there will be few problems for other police forces to get at it.

Right, right, but, are they going to be cracking down on users in any actual way? Is that possible?

possible, yes. likely, dunno.

If you're having Oink problems I feel bad for you, son.

pinkie have you been stealing music

Did OiNK keep logs? I'm assuming it must have to police those "only one account per user, no resigning up and we are checking" rules

yes, logs have been kept of every user's downloaded torrents for about a year now iirc

cutty can i retain u ?????????

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuwwMZKYxag

there was the option to turn the download logs off (which i did!) - not sure if that information wasnt being captured some other way tho

as for legal ramifications - in the us only 0 day release group types have been prosecuted. regular user have been sued - generally settling for a couple thousand bucks.

what about the single mom who was sued for $220K??

http://oinkmemorial.blogspot.com/

She was originally fined much less that the $220K, that was the result of her court loss when trying to fight back with horrible "evidence".

really?

Yeah. See http://idolator.com/tunes/get-ready-for-more-lawsuits/record-labels-to-finally-get-money-from-a-filesharer-307494.php and http://news.zdnet.com/2010-9588_22-6213649.html

When our world changed forever...

While the void on OINK.CD website became an ever-present reminder of unspeakable loss, it also opened a space of deep courage, compassion and triumph of human spirit.

Is this for real? Or someone taking the piss?

Yeah, I think the RIAA tried to settle with her for the usual couple thousand dollars, but she decided to fought it. From what I've read her case was really, really weak and the jury sided with the RIAA - so now she's faced with much, much higher fines.

s1ocki, if you're talking about the woman in MN, they only sued her after she was dumb enough to reject the initial settlement and claim that they couldn't prove that she was the user that uploaded the songs.

Unfortunately for her, they could.

xposts:yep

http://aynrandwich.googlepages.com/pigarrest.jpg

what if you never uploaded anything?

that's not how bittorrent works; you almost certainly uploaded _something_

seeding?

yaha

by uploading i meant putting shit up on oink itself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuwwMZKYxag

People, who expected the owner of Oink to have decent-sized biceps?????????????????

must be down to lifting ALL THOSE BAGS OF CASH he was making from hi LUCRATIVE SITE. oh, hang on ...

i know of one valiant editor who is pruning some of the more idiotic lies from PA's copy as i type. i dread what most of the rest of the UK press will print tomorrow.

so many pretty blatant distortions in that bbc report

The PA one is woeful. They're desperately trying to make it into an INTERNATIONAL MONEY-MAKING operation. The pay off is genius: "Copyright theft is ... vandalising our culture".

who's saying that?

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry.

o, rite. SHOCKAH.

Any precedent for Canadians getting sued?

If I go down for oinking Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" (12-inch version), the world is FUCKED UP

There's precious little reporting going on that I can see. It's just a screed from Mr Police Man and Mr Record company.

Right enough, we don't often bother with what the criminal element says. "I think it's outrageous that they've got this £80m haul of cocaine. It's going to send the price rocketing, and I was going out this weekend".

xpsts

Haha Confounded.
"Well, y'rronner, I think listening to Dan Hartman was punishment enough."

has anyone ever been prosecuted for using BitTorrent?

oink.justgotowned.com

http://torrentfreak.com//images/elitet.jpg

Wow - read that original article on the bust - Interpol led up the raid and arrest - that's one pissed off band!

http://www.losanjealous.com/img/06/a/neilhamburger.jpg

^^^this is what i've looked like all day.

also BanIronPrison.

That BBC report clip on youtube is worth watching for the montage of file footage on music piracy that includes napster, winamp, and a sound clip of 'the real slim shady.'

"The Day The Free Music Died" will be one headline.

Moo me, UK

oink.justgotowned.com

now that we have this we don't need any other music anyway

http://rawkblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/critical-backlash-why-we-need-oink.html

oh god.

im grieving oink as much as the next guy, but fuck. what should we expect from a blog called "The Rawking Refuses To Stop!" though.

FACT: that article is naive

i could never get an invite, so i'm glad the fuckers went down

fuck, i was going to DL like 3 gigs today for a dj set this week.

and i had just made power user ;_;

A stolen candybar is not a lost sale. The kids with the most candy are hoarding them because they can, not because they're trying to save money on paying for candy. No one is ever going to go out and buy 5-10 snickers bars a week, but that's about how many a good chunk of us download.

i wish i could illegally download a corporate milky way right now

No one is ever going to go out and buy 5-10 snickers bars a week

RONG.

snickers-breath

<i>Along with every other indie college kid, 90% of the shows I go to I wouldn't of gone to if I didn't d/l the album. 90% of the albums I buy I wouldn't have bought if I hadn't downloaded them prior.</i>

!! 'cos no-one went to shows or bought records before oink was invented!

Limited edition OiNK Snickers bar:

http://www.slashfood.com/media/2007/02/snickersbacon.jpg

Home killing is, er, in Soviet Russia, er, oh, nevermind.

!! 'cos no-one went to shows or bought records before oink was invented!

doesn't mean it isn't true? i haven't read the article, but just because college kids went to shows without having downloaded the album 20 years ago doesn't mean they still do

i could never get an invite, so i'm glad the fuckers went down

-- mitya, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 7:56 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ this. Oink Administrator burned me.

opinion piece on oink from dj rupture

"Word is the Danish branch of the IFPI has "seriously proposed" allowing peer-to-peer downloading in exchange for a small monthly fee charged to all ISP users."

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/music_industry.html

???

(via Coolfer)

DJ Rupture OTM. Especially about digital music having to be talked about in commons analogies now. No scarcity=no money, basically.

i would pay a small monthly fee to the danish branch of the IFPI to use oink.

i would pay a small monthly fee to all of this white girls

^^also.

don't look now, but indietorrents appears to have gone into hiding.

has dj spooky weighed in yet

or dj martian

hypothetical question cos I'm not very smart with this stuff: if you download but piggyback your wireless, do you technically not have your own isp and therefore potentially get others (you're borrowing bandwidth from) into trouble?

<i>Aside: If Radiohead (the British rock band who achieved worldwide success via a long-term mutually-beneficial relationship with a major record label) were truly radical, they would have posted their new album as a BitTorrent file with a PayPal & bank account link for the fans who felt like paying. Not hosting it on some weird website with an awkward interface & requiring credit card info…</i>

Uh huh...

hypothetical question cos I'm not very smart with this stuff: if you download but piggyback your wireless, do you technically not have your own isp and therefore potentially get others (you're borrowing bandwidth from) into trouble?

-- paulhw, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 9:50 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

lol in the uk i think people have been prosecuted for stealing wifi.

they could 'piggyback' piracy + wireless theft rofl

on the flip side, people used having wifi as a way out of being prosecuted for a while, since the downloading could theoretically have been done by anyone in the vicinity

in that case i'm golden.

it doesn't work anymore

ho-hum.

so hands up who re-downloaded soulseex tonite

http://enjoys.it/2007/10/23/some-facts-and-some-rumors-about-the-oink-takedown/

that 'they've never done it before' is ironclad logic

if one more person brings up radiohead in the context of oink i'm gonna scream. HELLO THEY ARE PUTTING OUT THEIR CD VIA A REGULAR LABEL. THE NEW MODEL IN ACTION GUYS.

LOL U SCREAMIN RIGHT NOW!!!

lol

When is the regular label CD version of In Rainbows coming out?

early next year, reportedly via ato (dave matthews label) in the states and xl internationally

That's ages away. Donation download is the primary medium in the first few months of release. I don't see how them releasing a regular CD eventually negates it being a new model. Especially if they don't take down the download option once the CD is released (are they going to?). I can't see a problem with linking the two things, maura. Certainly not enough to make you scream!

can we unban mickey just for this thread? its not the same without him.

<i>Aside: If Radiohead (the British rock band who achieved worldwide success via a long-term mutually-beneficial relationship with a major record label) were truly radical, they would have posted their new album as a BitTorrent file with a PayPal & bank account link for the fans who felt like paying. Not hosting it on some weird website with an awkward interface & requiring credit card info…</i>

Uh huh...

-- Eppy, Wednesday, 24 October 2007 06:54 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

^^^

I tried to buy it through the website (using Linux and Firefox) and couldn't. I tried really hard too. No other website gives that much grief.

yeah i slskd that shit, the website was all kinds of slow

gr8080 OTM.

u didn't need 2 give radiohead cc info unless u wanted to.

i have a spare, unlistened, set of mp3s of 'in rainbows' if anyone wants them.

hahahaha

gr8080 OTM.

-- John Justen, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 6:05 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

bring back borchardt for schadenfreude + fun

http://bp1.blogger.com/_w6BD02rLjME/Rx5_LZz4o7I/AAAAAAAAADc/Gp_-chtteQo/s1600-h/oink+911+banner.jpg

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a61/npope3001/oink911banner.jpg

xpost I don't think coding errors negate the model they're using.

Also, I couldn't have used BitTorrent as of a few months ago--I know it seems like everyone has their own dedicated non-firewalled internet connection these days but lots of people don't. I know torrents don't work on a lot of campus networks, for instance. So coding errors aside, their model reached a lot more model than Mr. Rupture's.

Model model model argh.

Uh-oh-spagetti-oh!

http://idolator.com/tunes/the-law/the-oink-fallout-should-its-ex+users-be-watching-their-backs-314216.php

As far as money goes, remember that "commercial advantage or private financial gain" can include the benefits of barter and the like. So the fact that, in your [description of OiNK's ratio rules], "they had to assist in infringement in order to keep infringing" might be enough.

But if RIAA does get the logs and data, then there will be hell to pay for anyone who used credit cards [to donate]; those who maintained membership via upload will be a little harder to trace because you'd have to follow the IP addresses, and ISPs are not always willing to hand over their customers without court orders

My bottom line--there should be some level of fear, but the action is going to be from the RIAA (again), not the feds, unless a new US Attorney General (once confirmed) has a real passion for prosecuting IP violations.

Alba, what they are basically doing is a "media runup" to the CD release where everyone's considered a member of the media. (Citizen journalism, y'all!) This way the temptation to leak the record would theoretically be tempered, although people traded the thing via BitTorrent anyway (no doubt in part because of the balkiness of the site.) The low quality of the MP3s that came out represented a deliberate attempt to make people *want* to buy the album in some physical form when it's available. The band's management has been quoted as saying as much.

First, I chatted with an American intellectual property litigator who asked to remain anonymous, and asked him basically the same question posed by Pytlik:

They should be very, very scared. There are at least two reasons why this is not just your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill file sharing copyright infringement: this involves music that has not yet been commercially released, and money changed hands.

that's dumb. pre-releases weren't what the majority of Oink users were downloading! almost all this speculation is based on ignorance about what the site was about.

EAT A DIJCK BATCHES
I'M A FREE MAN
http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-released-from-custody-071023/

latebloomer i know what the site is about. the issue is what the labels care about at this point, and they pretty much only focus on pre-release material in their litigation/c&d letters. and the fact that oink had copious information on its users and what they were downloading means that people who seeded those torrents (including people who were doing it 'just to help out their ratio') might be worried.

the idea of oink as this paradise of out-of-print stuff that was all free and clear and out of the mainstream, mannnn, is a really beautiful one, but it ain't really all that true.

no, it's the idea of oink as near compendium of EVERY PIECE OF MUSIC EVER RECORDED

it was the most thorough database of the history of popular music

god someone please post the pig crying again

are there any torrent site around that come close? i didn't think so, but chatted to some guy a month or two ago, and he mentioned some site.. but i did forget the name of it.

YSI

when i stared using oink there were only like a few thousand torrents i used to go through and check all the new ones every day - i am an oink og bow down

someone please tell me how hard it is to peg IP addresses exactly to torrent activity.

I've been told it's way, way harder (read: expensive/time consuming) to do that than cherrypick shit off of someone's "sharing folder" on Napster or whatever.

it's not the idea of oink being a haven for stuff that's out of print or really obscure, but of if having good rips in various bitrates of say the first talking heads album or the fourth public enemy album or the 19th live phish album or some j-pop record or what have you.

aka what cutty said

ok yeah.

cutotmy.

i actually looked up how many live phish albums there are (20).

last thing downloaded from oink - Britney Spears "Blackout"

i have many regrets

http://www.2pass.co.uk/nervous.gif

credit to am0n

when they kick at my front door
how'm i gonna come?

http://images.dr3vil.com/files2/default/Eagle911.gif

Big problem here: Not a bald eagle. Might even be a hawk of some kind.

kestrels have feelings too

I left my Azureus running, and one of my files just started uploading ... and I have no idea how or why (and I'll be the first to admit that I do not understand the techy side of this stuff). Anyways, I stopped the seeding ... cuz that shit could be the pigs, man. I ain't sharing my stash wit dem!

I love how this "exclusive" site apparantly was used by everyone on the internet.

I just removed all the oink torrents from uTorrent and it feels a bit surreal.

aw shit, I just donated like 4 days ago.

i honestly felt helpless for a bit after i heard it. like if the only place i ate for 2 years suddenly wasn't there anymore.

^^^i know this is fodder for lol oink people but it's true :( :( :(

i think it's hilarious that the dude who organized the raid was like, "thousands of people payed premium money for this site." idiot.

I often noticed IMAGE/ requests to my website that came from OINK and had no problems with users sharing my stuff since it seemed a fairly small and exclusive community of people who dug music.

Not to derailroad the thread, but my main problem is with all the Russian mp3 sites and the people who use them and take some kind of moral high-ground when most of the goods they offer are obviously downloaded en-masse from file-sharing in the first place! A bunch of them still have tags of the original rippers, FFS! That and the rumours of organised crime involvement and the seeming impossibility of getting to speak to anyone at the Russian collecting agency it all leaves a bad taste in my mouth - obviously they're the ones making REAL money off mp3s rather than the filesharers.

i dont think i can read abt music anymore - i just reflexively go to open oink in a new tab whenever i hear abt something i want

i don't think i can listen to music anymore

i just miss my cute avatar.

http://home.flash.net/~ulknatme/monument.gif

i miss paying money to download pre-releases. i don't think i can do that anymore on oink.

Anti file-sharing laws considered

Lord Triesman called on internet service providers to take a "more activist role" in the problem of illegal file sharing.

(I'm suing the government because they own the road where someone drove too fast and crashed into my car. It's their road, so it's their fault.)

(except, that's not what he said, is it? nevermind)

I wonder if he backed up the db surreptitiously to some host far, far away. Would surely have been prudent. Cos it's a bad loss otherwise. Not quite library of Alexandria as I read somewhere, but money-grubbing vandalism all the same.

Apparently not:

http://tehpaine.blogspot.com/2007/10/sit-down-and-shut-fuck-up.html

hmmm

http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-released-from-custody-071023/#comment-194577

http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-released-from-custody-071023/#comment-194601

http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-released-from-custody-071023/#comment-194613

wow.

yikes.

none of them said what country they're in, huh?

cuz they're lying?

thousands of pounds of ebooks

when i logged in to my personal computerised desktop PC today there was an internet e-mail page from my ISP telling me i was a cunt.

aha i get it now!

i uploaded thousands and thousands of pounds of missy elliot. hopefully i'll survive :X

when i logged in to my personal computerised desktop PC today

Actually, my ISP does stuff like that too. Once you've used up 90% of your monthly Gigabytes, the next page you open will automatically go to a warning page of theirs, telling you that you need to watch out or pay extra. - I mean, it's pretty easy for them to put up something like that for any IP address they want to contact.

(this hasn't got anything to do with illegal stuff, by the way, just that my ISP has a monthly data limit) ("limit" was the word I couldn't think of when I wrote the previous message :-) )

aye, maybe so. but i very much doubt this is the case here.

i mean: a felonious user is still a user paying their subs, right? so until some kind of charges are brought, what kind of ISP is going to cut off a source of income? also: i'm pretty sure most ISPs have a vague notion of the phrase "innocent until proven guilty".

these are just two of the things that set off the GrimlyFishy-o-Meter about this one. sure, i could be wrong. it has been known, once or twice. but, eh ...

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/10/24/time_to_clear_up_the_murk_about_oink.html

Oink interview 1: http://dot-slash-csc.iblogger.org/oinkfaq.html
OInk interview 2: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/25/ninternet125.xml

I'm kinda hoping the industry is going to learn something this time, but I'm pessimistic.

I know that technically he's not doing anything wrong, and the argument about it being a choice to do something illegal, but I think it's really ridiculous to say it wasn't intended to be used or wasn't recognized as being used for illegal music downloads. I think the Oink model is good, I don't make a lot of money, so I need to know where it goes with CDs. I do go to more shows and buy more CDs because of Oink, because I find more things I truly enjoy.

It's preposterous to say that Oink is no more of an enabler of copyright violation than an ISP.

I am in a band who are trying to 'make it' at the moment. The fact is that I would be so happy if every person in the world wanted to download my music for free - as long as I could take home 30k a year from shows, that would be fine.

Thanks
Offensive? Unsuitable? Report this comment.

This guy's got it figured out

Enabling copyright infringement isn't a crime under English law:

While FACT's statement cited "offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement," Gloucestershire police told IT news site The Register that the man has been "arrested for supplying property with a registered trade mark without permission."

The first of these is not an offence and the second does not fit the circumstances, according to Kim Walker, head of intellectual property at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM.

"We don't have an offence in the UK for facilitation of copyright infringement," said Walker. "Instead, it is possible that prosecutors could attempt to characterise this as an offence of 'distributing' infringing copies or 'communicating' copies to the public in the course of a business."

http://www.out-law.com/page-8568

Yes, fair point. My comment was ambiguous.

Instead, it is possible that prosecutors could attempt to characterise this as an offence of 'distributing' infringing copies or 'communicating' copies to the public in the course of a business.

What I meant by "enabling". I think demonstrating that the owner of Oink is liable for massive copyright infringement (and presumably some criminal charges under the Computer Misuse Act) is a legal open goal. Dude is going down. The idea that the distributed nature of BitTorrent means the owner of the tracker isn't liable is wishful thinking that is going to get absolutely shit on in court.

Anyone claiming there is no legal difference between how responsible for the illegal activity of its users are Oink and ISPs (who we all agree should not be held responsible) is either being disingenuous or simply doesn't understand the precedent.

[IANAL, but I did used to work for the Lib Dems on their policy for the internet, publishing and copyright, and then for an academic publisher, and now I own a record label, so I do know my way around the relevant UK law.]

It's all Pedro and Keith, this raid: http://oink.cd/index2.html (!!)

Strange.

You'd expect them to use more smileys amongst each other, wouldn't you?

http://i21.tinypic.com/2epr59e.gif

http://i23.tinypic.com/14j89ec.gif

I've been wondering about the legal side of it, too. I don't know how well the "I'm just the same as Google, me" thing stands up to the laugh test, however.

people does not understand internet, or people older than 40 should not be allowed to make any judgement about teh internet, unless they've got some form of education on the matter. i imagine it being surrealistically funny for that Oink guy to be questioned

yeah, that Oink-as-Google thing is pretty disingenuous to say the least, considering you had to maintain a share ratio or get your account deleted.

the fact that hes talking in detail about lots of this shit to, you know, the internet sounds crazy stupid to me. along with the part about not having hired a lawyer.

@deej, yeah, but he isn't charged with anything yet. So there's nothing a lawyer could do for him right now. Except being costly to someone who just got fired.

well, i would still prob stfu from the online convos/talking to the press

i would prob have not started an illegal filesharing hub

echoes of aphex lamenting the loss of audiogalaxy back in the day

if i had, i also wouldn't house it in the uk, and i would probably want the url to not be publicly listed w/ my name and address

also would not have called it "oink!" and made it embarrassingly twee

Wow, I had no idea OiNK was such a high-trafficked site. Did it really replace Slsk for you guys? (The only places I use to download entire albums are non-p2p venues like Sound Opinions Message Board and Sordo Music Archive.)

(I mean, I thought ILX just made fun of OiNK users.)

Did it really replace Slsk for you guys?

it did for me.

slsk was down when i tried it last night o_O

friggy> you just get bailed for free?
OiNK> yes
--
smartface> does the paypal account have any funds on it ATM?
OiNK> it had some, and the account has been permanently limited
smartface> did they actually question you?
OiNK> of course, for hours
OiNK> the police had very limited technical knowledge, which made the interview quite amusing actually.
OiNK> i wasn't willing to teach them how to use a computer
OiNK> they actually wanted me to teach them how to set up a website
OiNK> i just told them to google it.
smartface> have you become a millionarie with our donations?
OiNK> no
smartface> are you planned for a trial anytime soon?
OiNK> the earliest date for trial is 26th december - though highly unlikely
--
Xenafor> IS YOUR FATHER OKAY AS WELL?
OiNK> my father is fine.
OiNK> my father was not arrested, though they did take his work laptop
Xenafor> Are you a vegetarian?
OiNK> yes.
--
apelure> what does the carges about fraud mean?
OiNK> i've not been charged ...
--
knifeboy> Did they do the good cop/bad cop routine?
OiNK> no
--
Stormx2> Everyone is first and foremost concerned for you and everything, but at the back of our minds (I think) we're interested in what you think will happen the the pink palace. Obviously you won't have a starring roll, but will the backups be destroyed?
OiNK> why would backups be destroyed?
--
j2los> do you think at minimum the forums will be restored as a community for discussing music?
OiNK> i don't know
j2los> do you think it is absurd that only now that the site has been taken down has it been deemed notable enough for a wikipedia article?
OiNK> i found that amusing, yes
OiNK> i'm glad the article is staying neutral
--
guildmast> Are there any plans for an official OiNK donations fund we can feel comfortable donating to?
OiNK> not yet
--
ftdrs> seriously though, what did they accuse you of?
OiNK> conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringements
--
maxdoubt> do you have/need legal representation?
OiNK> i'm still deciding on legal advice
--
Kevix> did you have any warning before hand that the knock opn your door was coming?
OiNK> no
--
Yawg> did you anticipate a raid in the past? Did you take any precautions regarding site design and logs and whatnot to protect the community?
OiNK> the logs we store aren't enough to inciminate users
--
Gl1mw0rm> are you still the rigtfull owner of the oink.cd domain?
OiNK> unclear
--
Barth> what about the recent security/privacy changes to the site and the irc? was that a coincidence or did you see something coming?
OiNK> coincidence
--
midnightgt> (without incriminating anyone) is there any copy of the source anywhere? Would you be in support of a second coming of the website? How do you think this reflects on the war on file sharing? (Certainly I do not feel like we are losing)
OiNK> sorry, no comment :)
--
lhnz> Why exactly did the cops want you to make a website for them?:P :D
OiNK> dunno
--
ATF> did you get fired from work?
OiNK> yes
--
gleam> do you think you or anyone else will ever hear from tmt again? :)
OiNK> no
--
MooIsTooWrong> do you think most of the people in this channel are asking asshat questions?
OiNK> yes
--
uQ1> What grounds did your work fire you?
OiNK> i'm not going to go into that, sorry.

And now, something from this morning (after he'd seen the guardian article)
OiNK> they got my company wrong, but besides that, it's quite a good article
OiNK> the police were here around 30 mins ago, and they were not happy one bit when they left
OiNK> they asked me how i was coping with all the media coming around
OiNK> i said "i don't mind it at all, i'm just telling them the truth, unlike you"

http://tehpaine.blogspot.com

a true hero

no jaymc, we made fun of people who wanted be oink users but couldn't get an invite

http://socialjustice.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/images/0/05/Assata_Shakur_-_early_picture.jpg

Xenafor> Are you a vegetarian?
OiNK> yes.

i gave a googler an invite once

Cutty otm

xp

seriously this dude is being silly. when he gets threatened w/ real time he will flip on any users who were posting shit before the release date.

http://www.airbrush.ch/images/DesignFabu/Fila.jpg

someone do nick sylvester style interview w/ OiNK

According to users, Oink had a daily throughput the equivalent of five million songs and registered members were able to download around 1,000 songs.

Best media line yet

i was about a year away from figuring out if i wanted to learn what oink is. don't you people get enough music as it is?

(boxcar)

i gave a googler an invite once

-- jhøshea, Thursday, October 25, 2007 12:37 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

lol, so did Confounded. to a lady who broke his heart.

crabcigar APPRECIATION THREAD

Q: Do I as a normal user need to be scared?
A: No. The logs stored were not enough to incriminate any of our users. They have better things to do than hunt down 180,000 Britney Spears fans.

if u uploaded an album before the release date tho?

not saying i have btw, i havent even been a member for over a year

i still miss audiogalaxy

Hardly an authoritative reply: http://tehpaine.blogspot.com/2007/10/frequently-asked-questions.html#c9161380854469170335

i gave a googler an invite once

-- jhøshea, Thursday, October 25, 2007 12:37 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

lol, so did Confounded. to a lady who broke his heart.

-- sanskrit, Thursday, October 25, 2007 1:25 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

do i want to know more abt this?

I hope everyone of you thieves is hounded to your graves for stealing money from artists that starved for their fame. You think that musicians are born rich? Think again. You're on the same moral ground as a race riot looter. Feel that you fucktards.

from Leee's link.

Feel that you fucktards.

audiogalaxy was such shit. yeah i want an album of mp3s culled from 10 different people, different bitrates, and some incompletes. uhhhh?

lol specifically a RACE riot looter

Audiogalaxy was BROAD; I could find music on there by local bands I went to college with. Also, the community aspect was great.
I missed OINK entirely, though one of you folks DID pass me an invite, so I'm not sure how it compares.

i assure you oink was BROAD-ER. i sent your significant other an invite.

Meanwhile, Usenet just keeps on chugging away...

Yeah, Audiogalaxy was awesome for tracking down rare b-side or whatever, but an absolute nightmare for getting albums.

What is usenet? I keep seeing this mentioned now.

It's like this text-based group-based topic-based network thing that existed before the graphical browser html thing took over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

some thoughts--

the record labels are already fucked. no hope for them with any of the new models they've tried to implement.

they had the biggest, nerdiest, music consumers (by consume i mean downloading, uploading and listening) right in front of them with oink.

they could have monetized that shit. release albums to oink, etc. instead the completely OBLITERATE their demographic in one fell swoop.

wake up, morans...

the labels couldn't get an invite

Approximately 175,000 of the 180,000 members were industry people.

i'm sure the real stats on industry people on oink would blow some minds.

I can't believe Usenet has never been seriously policed by The Man. It's been the home of free shit for a decade or more, and honestly, it seems as good as ever.

I can't believe people don't know what Usenet is.

The Man and all his fuckwitted lackeys are way too dense to get their heads round binaries.

mind, i've not been anywhere near usenet for years now.

anyone have an invite to usenet ;)

alt.confused.googlers.IRE

Anti file-sharing laws considered

I'm confused by a couple of quotes:

While he said that the government had no interest in "hounding 14-year-olds who shared music", it was intent on tracking down those who made multiple copies for profit.

so they'll be tracking down... no one? "Multiple copies for profit"?

"Where people have registered music as an intellectual property I believe we will be able to match data banks of that music to music going out and being exchanged on the net"

And, what? I can't even begin to guess a meaning for that. Is there a single vague notion about what file-sharing involves amongst people of authority?

I can't believe Usenet has never been seriously policed by The Man.

I believe my ISP doesn't carry binaries groups anymore after being threatened by exactly That Man a couple of years ago - but when they did their retention rates were so crappy it wasn't very useful anyway.

God, all this talk of usenet brings back memories... ("http? It'll never catch on, it's just souped-up ftp with pictures!")

Approximately 175,000 of the 180,000 members were industry people.

This spirit of this is true - It's always really funny to hear the Brave Filesharers of Today imagining that every last label employee wasn't on OiNK. Because in fact they all were.

I can't believe Usenet has never been seriously policed by The Man. It's been the home of free shit for a decade or more, and honestly, it seems as good as ever.

It makes this news story even more hilarious than ever...

RIAA Sues Usenet, Decries it as 'Brazen Outlaw'
By David Kravets 10.16.07 | 4:00 PM

The Recording Industry Association of America's litigation strategy is taking a detour into the internet's Precambrian layer, suing a company that distributes the ancient decentralized message board known as Usenet.

Fargo, North Dakota-based Usenet.com is the target of the lawsuit (.pdf) filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in which 14 recording companies allege the service "enables and encourages its customers to reproduce and distribute millions of infringing copies of Plaintiff's valuable copyrighted sound recordings."

The suit, filed Friday, is something of a throwback in the RIAA's recent litigation strategy. It targets an alleged facilitator of copyright theft instead of an individual pirate.

"They started by going after Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and after that they said, 'We're gonna go after individuals to see if we (can) get into the psyche of people that peer-to-peer file sharing is wrong,'" says Washington, D.C.-based copyright attorney Ross Dannenberg. "Now it has come full circle. Throughout this cycle, (Usenet) newsgroups have been ignored."

In the past four years, the RIAA has sued more than 20,000 people on allegations of copyright infringement. Two weeks ago, the association won a $222,000 judgment in the first such case to go to trial.

But Usenet's decentralized architecture means RIAA gumshoes can't easily trace uploaders, as they can on peer-to-peer services like Kazaa. That may have prompted the RIAA to focus on feed provider Usenet.com, which boasts about the anonymity it provides users.

"Shh ... quiet! We believe it’s no one’s business but your own what you do on the internet or in Usenet! We don’t log your activity. We don’t track your downloads," the company says on its website. It also offers an encrypted tunneling service, for an additional fee, to frustrate any efforts by ISPs or corporate network administrators to police downloads.

The Usenet network is a global, distributed message-board network that was created in the pre-internet days, when it relied on dialup modems for distribution. Now it's carried over the internet. Usenet.com redistributes the full Usenet feed for a subscription fee.

Usenet.com did not immediately return messages for comment.

RIAA goon #1: I hear there's copyright violation on Usenet! OMGWTF
RIAA goon #2: Usenet? Is that a dot com or a dot net?
RIAA goon #1: Just sue whatever comes up

I believe my ISP doesn't carry binaries groups anymore after being threatened by exactly That Man a couple of years ago - but when they did their retention rates were so crappy it wasn't very useful anyway.

All the more reason to spend a couple bucks on dedicated usenet service. ISP usenet almost always blows.

Has an actual economist ever written an article on this issue?

^

The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales An Empirical Analysis

sort of? there have been a handful like that

I'm not really wondering about the effect on record sales so much as an analysis of consumer behavior. Has there ever been in instance where a business sustained itself because its customers were nice people who liked to give money to support the product, not because giving money actually got them something extra? Or a commodity whose scarcity was maintained only through the threat of lawsuits?

Shareware

I'd like to see some nutbar group of nutbars try to prosecute usenet for archiving newsgroup posts for 40 years. Next is house raids for blank CDs.

In the past four years, the RIAA has sued more than 20,000 people

That figure is staggering. What the hell is their plan here, exactly? That from now on major labels have to figure legal carpet bombing of their customers into their business model?

Business model? None of that money they get from those lawsuits goes to artists, I'm not sure if it goes to the labels either.

Record industry pushes ISPs to cut off file sharers

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/25/triesman_isps_music/

and one of the comments:

A couple of things I'd like...
By Anonymous Coward
Posted Thursday 25th October 2007 12:00 GMT

from the record industry...

1) SELL ME THE MUSIC I'M ALREADY WILLING TO PAY FOR

My vinyl collection is on its last legs and YOU have the masters, I just have a knackered Rega Planar 3. YOU have already issued most of the stuff I want on CD, so YOU have already done the necessary work. SO EFFING SELL ME IT, rather than telling me it's "out of print" FFS. If I want to buy a not very obscure 25 year old LP (e.g. Doobie Bros), WHY WON'T YOU SELL ME IT?

YOU, MR RECORD INDUSTRY, are **forcing** me to go the "illegal" route. DO NOT FORCE ME TO GO DOWN A ROUTE YOU TELL OTHERS NOT TO USE. SELL ME MUSIC I AM WILLING TO PAY FOR.

2) DRM benefiting the PUNTER as well as the Pigopolist

If you insist on using DRM, you could at least try to implement some kind of benefit to the punter rather than today's purely one-sided DRM. Have your DRM incorporate some kind of "owner-specific" features so that the paid-for content plays anywhere the user knows the (traceable) user-specific key. More specifically, make it *not* play anywhere other than places I want it to, e.g. if some lowlife nicks my (paid for) music collection, I want it to be useless.

YOU, THE RECORD INDUSTRY, ARE THE ARCHITECTS OF YOUR OWN FUTURE, BUT TODAY YOU ARE ARCHITECTING YOUR OWN DOWNFALL.

There, that feels better, even though it'll do no good. Sorry if it disturbs you. Is there anything else to report from InTheCity yet?

Uh, Amazon.co.uk shows the Doobie Brothers' catalog in print, ah, Mr. Coward.

two interesting pieces

IFPI makes OiNK squeal: http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i322308809550e01b9e968080a7f5fac0

Myths and facts of OiNK's takedown: http://www.slyck.com/story1608_Myths_and_Facts_of_OiNKs_Takedown

So the issue they're most concerned about is prerelease music and this is the only solution they can come up with?

http://www.libble.com/ bravely taking up the cause/trying to mark themselves out as early contenders to the vacated throne?

Stupid. The end of OiNK is much more than just the end of one site. What comes next (if anything - it doesn't have to happen, dear music industry. Really! It's going to take a pretty jump in logic to adjust to the changed reality, but you'll have to do it in the end - preferably before the end, because music fans don't want you to die, they want you to be with them and not against them) will not be an Oink clone, but something completely different.

i don't know that you can elevate OiNK to being the beginning and the end of music torrents trackers. the first wave of torrent sites were being shut down when OiNK started, so why shouldn't this just be another phase in the cycle?

will not be an Oink clone, but something completely different.

Where's the new less-incriminating software supporting this drastic change?

when they go for 5l5k then we can worry (and i think users of that are probably less traceable)

Well, 'they' have already tried that in the past: http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefender-emails-leaked-070915/

So it's probable they're still checking out 5l5k.

(search for 5l5k on the page I linked, spelled correctly)

That mediadefender stuff is really interesting, privatized entrapment and privatized soldiers. If you build it, they will come is now if there's a loophole, we will exploit it.

Yeah I know. I was quite baffled when I first read it. This is turning into a whole new 'battle', with the privatisation (private bureaus setting up fake sites, leaking fake torrents, actively trying to bring you to the honeypot) you described.
But somehwat assuring to file-sharers should be that this is a prime example of sheer amateurism. Question is how long it will stay that way.

Ever since the internet and broadband have become so popular:

- releasing movies months apart in different parts of the world,
- releasing dvds months apart in different parts of the world,
- sending out promo copies of cds before the actual release date,
- showing tv series months apart in different parts of the world,
- (...)

= ASKING FOR TROUBLE.

(I hesitated about using the word entrapment.)

If people read discussions about something they're not allowed to see/hear for months because it's not out (in their part of the world) yet and they can't buy it (other region code, for instance), expecting them to wait is maybe just a tiny bit sadistic.

Instead of being glad that people like what you produce and trying to find a way to release/broadcast stuff to your fans/viewers/listeners worldwide at the same time (people would pay to see Lost online at the same time as the series is broadcast in the US, but they don't have the chance to do so. People would pay to get a download copy of a promo they're going to buy physically later on (say, buy the promo mp3s and then just buy the booklet later, or the physical cd at a lower price because they already paid for the promo). People would pay, but they have to wait. While the internet exists. Sadism, I tells ya.

I know, it's not possible to release every movie and tv show worldwide at the same time. TV channels who buy the rights wouldn't pay as much if you've streamed the shows online worldwide earlier - but you would have made money from those streams too! - just brainstorming, trying to show that nothing HAS to be the way it is. Get rid of that first week sales doctrine, THINK about how you can make money from promo cds? Only make promos that have half of every track? I don't know, I don't work in the industry, I'm just typing this and coming up with alternatives that nobody is even considering because they're too busy playing cops & criminals all the time, as if we were still in the pre-internet era.

Note: illegally downloading material that IS commercially available locally, that IS on their local TV, that IS for sale at a reasonable price (and not "there's only this double disc version that costs double of what the single disc you were asking for"), that's the stuff that should be considered evil copyright crime. But everything I read gives the impression that they're going after prerelease material most of all and trading stuff that's in the shops isn't their priority. THIS is why record stores are closing all over: their business isn't the industry's priority.

I've already tried something like this on the Mickey thread. I'm not getting my hopes up. Sigh.

nothing beats free

Pay for the stuff you download then. That way, you're going to remain free.

that's the stuff that should be considered evil copyright crime

wah wah wah

Bah. Pearls before swine (oink!), why am I bothering?

lol as far as i know no one has yet been imprisoned for downloading. i like yr slogan sense tho ;)

x-post
If your over-used, trite arguments are the pearls in your collection... ah, nevermind

why are we all bothering when american gangster just leaked?

i mean get to dling people ffs

If selling movies, music, and other consumables on a per-item basis is to be profitable, then the process to get those things by paying should be just as easy as the illegal ways.

I'd imagine it's the case for a handful of people, but I admittedly used oink in addition to buying albums on bleep, beatport, iTunes (the newer, higher quality stuff), having a monthly emusic subscription, and having bought a couple season passes for television shows on iTunes. I also attended two concert festivals this summer and regularly drive out of state to see musicians perform. Maybe I'm some crazy outlier in the market, but I would like to think no artists are lacking because of my actions.

Oh yeah, and about a third of my oink usage was me downloading albums that I either own on cd but was too lazy to find the album in the other room and rip it, or grabbing mp3s of something I own on vinyl.

Note that in the former case, downloading it took less time and effort than doing it myself.

From the Billboard article:

the real fallout, the IFPI warns, will be felt when the trade body scrutinizes data on the site's estimated 180,000 users, who paid "donations" to access the service.

i think the argument is that by downloading you are trading uploads = bartering which is paying

Oh yeah, and about a third of my oink usage was me downloading albums that I either own on cd but was too lazy to find the album in the other room and rip it, or grabbing mp3s of something I own on vinyl.

Yeh, but also getting albums that I only have on MP3 from the shitty 96k early sharing days.

What's this about American Gangster leaking?

Yeh, but also getting albums that I only have on MP3 from the shitty 96k early sharing days

"but, your honour, i was only downloading this illegally to replace my old, less-good illegal download"?

Exactly!

oh, that'll be fine, then.

i think the argument is that by downloading you are trading uploads = bartering which is paying

Yeah, but it's not just rhetoric to say that that's completely untrue.

lol @ usenet.com

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1572693/20071024/index.jhtml

Crazy Swedes are crazy:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=oink.cd

(scroll down to see the name servers: wtf?)

and then there's boink.cd :

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-to-bring-back-oink-071026/

the real fallout, the IFPI warns, will be felt when the trade body scrutinizes data on the site's estimated 180,000 users

no the real fallout will be felt when you lose your fucking jobs, you laughable fearmongers. you rats better collectively jump ship and go (presumably back to) lawyering for non-musical corporations before it happens.

Seriously- I attend WIPO conferences on the regular and can't believe the bullying, self-assured caricatures who represent the RIAA, MPAA & IFPI there.

i blame los angeles for everything

Seriously- I attend WIPO conferences on the regular and can't believe the bullying, self-assured caricatures who represent the RIAA, MPAA & IFPI there.

-- blunt, Saturday, 27 October 2007 21:04 (Yesterday) Link

Blunt:

I don't doubt that they're @ssholes...

But since you are actually at WIPO meetings, I assume you are of legal expertise in some sense or another, so: what do you think of their legal arguments per se, at least in the US? I hear of all these 20,000 renegade file-sharers being sued by the RIAA, and I assume they're all taking the standard $5,000-whatever settlement to avoid litigation. But someday, someone will stand up to them for serious (I hope and pray, anyway) based on objections to the unconstitutional current enforcement of copyright law. Where do you think that would go?

And moreover: what do you think the likelihood and success of litigation against individual average OiNK users would be based on your understanding of US copyright law? (I guess the more relevant question would not be about the "letter" of the law, but rather the corrupt, RIAA/MPAA lobbyist-friendly enforcement of the law by Bush administration stooges) And when will those horrible laws be changed to represent benefit of the citizenry, not our corporate overlords, anyway? It seems inevitable...

Do I seem angry...?

dr. funktronic should never be angry

My anger manifests itself as syncopated bass riffs and sequined jumpsuits. FEAR IT

But since you are actually at WIPO meetings, I assume you are of legal expertise in some sense or another, so: what do you think of their legal arguments per se, at least in the US? I hear of all these 20,000 renegade file-sharers being sued by the RIAA, and I assume they're all taking the standard $5,000-whatever settlement to avoid litigation. But someday, someone will stand up to them for serious (I hope and pray, anyway) based on objections to the unconstitutional current enforcement of copyright law. Where do you think that would go?

Uh, somebody did stand up to them recently and she got stomped like a narc at a biker rally:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071004-verdict-is-in.html

Yes, I had seen that. But, and I realize this has been observed 4x10^8 times elsewhere, how is it possibly constitutional to punish a private citizen as though (for instance) they were a rival corporation that had stolen master tapes of an artist's new album and released it as their own? The law, as currently enforced, clearly encourages this, but that is literally irrational, is it not? How can they possibly find that a single downloader who downloaded 24 songs is responsible for $200k+ in damages? And to extend, I would imagine the average OiNK user has more like on the order of 20-30k downloaded songs... so... $300,000,000, approximately half of BMI's 2004 revenue? Which is... fucking gay?

And on a moral point, of course, it is especially infuriating to consider that the CEO of any particular record company wastes $200k in a cross-country trip or two on his private jet...

hey guys

http://oink.cd/

lol

looooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

how dey do dat

well doctor, I merely write articles about those meetings while attending them out of personal interest for a project I'm involved in. so you're better off asking cutty really- but my conviction (har) is that the economic & PR side of individual litigation will eventually backfire on the RIAA, which recently admitted that it doesn't know how much it's spent and how much more it will cost, all in the face of dwindling returns on the sales front (except digital sales but they don't boost them intelligently) and with bigger fish to fry, such as good old physical piracy. years into the process they're still trying to deter the general public by publicizing random extortions like the slaughter discussed in the above link.
so I'm saying, stopping this doesn't call for in-depth analysis of US copyright law, which is cooked and skewed in favor of major lobbies anyway. what I am hoping for is that past a certain level of unpopularity, the majors will be unable to dazzle juries into voting in their favor- then all these technically illiterate judges and corrupt lawyers can go feast on warm, replete bags of dicks.

so looks like oink never lost the domain, handed it over to pirate bay

Long but interesting (mh is going to say it's all trite again, but I liked it)

http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when-pigs-fly-death-of-oink-birth-of.html

(good comments there too, btw)

Yeah, I was entertained by that demonbaby screed.

Libble Invites

That article that StanM posted is very good, and makes a lot of points that I had been thinking but hadn't really seen anywhere else. Someone on another discussion board (I think it was the Onion AV Club) said something to the extent that if there were a Netflix for music downloads, he would be all over it. Services like these do exist, like Rhapsody or the Zune music store, where you pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited music downloads. The problem with these stores is that the selection of music is still subpar, especially compared to Oink. Hell, you still can't buy Beatles or Led Zep records on the iTunes music store yet! I have a Zune, but if I had paid the 15 bucks a month for the Zune music store, I'd still have to look elsewhere to find a large majority of the music I regularly listen to. These services do have their customers, but they are not up to the standard that most music listeners would be willing to pay for.

I think one of the better solutions to this problem would be to have a large bittorrent tracker set up by the music industry, in which users pay something like 25 bucks a month to have unlimited access, and which is completely hands-off on the industry's part, unless they want to remove pre-releases until they've actually been released in stores. It seems like it might be an unrealistic answer to this problem, but it shouldn't be- radio stations can play whatever they want and have at hand, as long as they pay royalties to the publishing companies (at least I think that's the basics of how it works, I don't have much experience in radio). And if the reported 180,000 members of Oink hd paid 25 dollars a month, the record labels would be pulling in four and a half million dollars a month, 54 million dollars a year.

I would be willing to pay for a service like this, but no such thing exists. If I want to have access to music in a variety as wide-ranging as existed on Oink, I have to do it illegally. It's a shame that they're missing such an obvious sort of revenue- I mean there'd be a shitload of red tape to sort through to work out something like this, but it's going to keep on happening whether they want it to or not. And people who download music would have less of an excuse for no paying than they would if a service like this were available.

lol

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/10/oink

I just signed up at wh*t.cd (For now, the real url is http://incegmbh.com/) and it looks promising. It's a fresh start from scratch rather than trying to fit in with someone else's jive and a lot of people in the "say hi" thread forum are describing their taste such as: "newwave/ebm/darkambient/synth/yelling/bizarrecore" which bodes well, I think. On libble I couldn't get people to snatch my files no how.

That demonbaby thing isn't really trite at all! It has a first-person account, perspective on the amount of money thrown around, and with some opinionated bullet points!

I was more offended by the <i>"I'm just typing this and coming up with alternatives that nobody is even considering because they're too busy playing cops & criminals all the time, as if we were still in the pre-internet era."</i> which is kind of patently untrue. They're baby steps and mostly a matter of the technology-purveyors moving forward than the RIAA, but there are subscription services (Napster, Zune stuff, etc), iTunes, the Amazon mp3 store, television stations making recent episodes streamable (although not to all locales), streamable Netflix even.

The question isn't why they're not picking up on new modes of distribution, it's why they have to be pulled kicking and screaming into it and are putting so much effort into propping up the old model. It's because it's been obnoxiously profitable and allows centralized control of so much distribution, merchandising, and helps further the system where the label basically owns bands.

Ah, I completely misunderstood your reply then. Sorry :-)

I think another interesting long-term cost of this, which isn't really considered, is bandwidth and hardware. ISPs have traditionally been able to sell accounts with much higher download speeds than upload speeds, or have even set limits or punished users who ran servers or had a lot of outgoing traffic.

When peer-to-peer traffic started to become popular I was still in school and was on a student board that liaised with the network administrators. The ongoing change in tactics as they first capped the maximum amount sent per computer, then rate limited students, then eventually invested in quality-of-service hardware was probably something that happened everywhere. But with home internet access, people now expect the ability to run p2p traffic 24/7. So there are a lot more computers that never get turned off, hard drives that die earlier, and around the clock bandwidth use.

There are going to be interesting arguments along the line that net neutrality legislation has been walking if we're going to end up with large content providers that want to distribute media efficiently without relying on p2p. Which is going to be ugly.

To clarify for those that haven't been following it, net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers may try to take an interest in the content being sent over their network and attempt to influence it. That would mean that they may privilege certain traffic, like degrading torrent transfer speeds since it saturates the network, or more likely do something like degrading the performance of certain sites while accelerating others.

I think neutrality is good, although it's a touchy thing. If I was into a lot of online gaming, I'd happily pay for an ISP that privileged game traffic to reduce latency, which would be allowable under most deals. But there are issues that fall slightly outside of it. What if your ISP was iTunes Store-approved and they had local caches of popular media, so you're getting downloads at torrent speeds without the necessity to keep up a ratio? Or if your all-you-can-eat music plan was bundled with your ISP bill?

http://www.synthtopia.com/news/06_05/images/moby.jpg

I honestly wonder if I'm a dinosaur now, because I still see CDs as the privileged, "ideal" form of music and would never pay for mp3s because I can't imagine paying for:
a) a digital file to store on my computer/mp3 player;
b) something twice, because I'd probably be picking up the CD too.

I'd be willing to pay for FLACs or other lossless formats, though.

"lossless"

http://oink.cx.la/

?

lol scam

re: the woman who "stood up" to the RIAA in the article upthread, she didn't so much stand up to them as present a unbelievably stupid defense that hinged on "You can't prove that that user was me. Oh wait, you can? well uh shit that sucks."

so plz plz try not to use her as an example of civil disobedience or whatever.

list of scams:

http://tehpaine.blogspot.com/2007/10/scamsite-news.html

I obviosuly put my naive hat on today.

re: the woman who "stood up" to the RIAA in the article upthread, she didn't so much stand up to them as present a unbelievably stupid defense that hinged on "You can't prove that that user was me. Oh wait, you can? well uh shit that sucks."

so plz plz try not to use her as an example of civil disobedience or whatever.

-- John Justen, Monday, 29 October 2007 19:11 (3 hours ago) Link

Yes, this was my impression of her case. Especially considering that to fight it in civil court doesn't seem like it would do much other than generate even more cost from a legal standpoint. I am wondering more what could/would happen if someone were to get charged criminally as a user, and then defend themselves with some badass copyright lawyers and say (in effect), "yeah, I did it. But these laws should be changed."

I just signed up at wh*t.cd (For now, the real url is http://incegmbh.com/) and it looks promising. It's a fresh start from scratch rather than trying to fit in with someone else's jive and a lot of people in the "say hi" thread forum are describing their taste such as: "newwave/ebm/darkambient/synth/yelling/bizarrecore" which bodes well, I think. On libble I couldn't get people to snatch my files no how.

So how is what.cd, saudade? i've stayed away from most after the oink collapse. everything looks like entrapment to me now anyways. waffles.fm, for example, wants people to send screenshots of their oink accounts/ paypal donation receipts to oink in order to get an invite. probably, probably nothing to fret over, but still....

So is Libble hosted in the US? Is that true? How about what.cd? And that libble invite thread is insane. Damn I feel old....

I like what.cd a lot better than any of the other "replacements" that have popped up so far. It has a clean and appealing design, pretty good user base made up of a lot of people who seem dedicated to rebuilding what made opp so unique--the collection of 200,000 torrents of unparalleled breadth and diversity.

However, what.cd is still buggy as hell, but not cripplingly so and the bandwidth seems to be sufficient. It's also currently hosted in the US because they're waiting for a .se host to open up, but will migrate as soon as that happens (soon). There are already multiple thousand torrents on the site and it's climbing at a rate of about 80 to 100 an hour--crazy! Lots of enthusiasm. Considering it's only been around for 3 days they're doing really well. :)
I'm sure once things calm down they will have to clean house a bit though.

am0n it be true http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac

you know, people, you can still hear clips for free of almost everything these days before you buy...

Thanks, saudade. it's been beat to death here, but shit-- some of the stuff on oink was wild. there were at least three formats of the karate kid soundtrack there (seriously). and three versions ain't near enough of that magic.... (I did, however, find this ridiculously rare funk record, The Black Experience Unlimited, which only had like a 200 pressing).

over at lizzible, the natives are growing wary:

"If you'd taken a look around you'd see that NMEtorrents would be a more fitting name. You Oinkers just don't understand!"

pirate bay c/d?

The idea of pirate bay as a discussion point to get things moving: c
The fact that it still is, well, stealing and illegal: d

no i mean as a reputable place to illegaly download music.

it's rubbish. try what.cd or wait a day for waffles, the great white hope. or whatever the oinkers have planned.

from #waffles.fm-chat:

[6:12pm] notlucky: all asians are gay?
[6:12pm] JfuckinGlass: Yup
[6:12pm] notlucky:
[6:12pm] hellohello: yeah
[6:12pm] hellohello: and the frenchies too
[6:13pm] xt3rm: i think 25% of america is gay

bring back oink, thx.

BOINK.CD load testing and early boink torrent upload FORMER OINK MEMBERS ONLY

I don't really cotton to this "oink members only stuff"--what's going on right now could be a tremendous opportunity for new people to get involved and start to appreciate flac etc., quality and dedication should be the criteria that helps select people for torrent communities, not screen caps and BS. As someone has already said somewhere else 'how many people were banned from oink every day?' because they couldn't toe the line. These same people can be banned anew wherever they turn up.

And Fourfoldvision, you are so totally otm about finding something so rare on oink that it was like your personal musical holy grail, the record that you thought you would never see, let alone hear in a good rip with the liner notes and everything. sigh.

what's going on right now could be a tremendous opportunity for new people to get involved

yeh, like cops :)

If only people put as much energy into reshaping the music industry as they do into finding new ways to download illegally.

^^these 2 things are not mutually exclusive.

True... I'm just sayin' is all.

word 'em up jon /via/ chi 2.0

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21444566/

The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the AP's findings with its own tests — including spotting forged messages sent by Comcast's computers to shut down connections.

This is stupid as hell if they want to maintain common carrier status, unless they're doing this to all torrent traffic. With quality of service crap you could list your policy on bandwidth allocation, but actually screwing with customers' connections by sending bad data is a shoddy business practice at best and malicious at worst.

will not be an Oink clone, but something completely different.

Where's the new less-incriminating software supporting this drastic change?

-- trashthumb, Friday, October 26, 2007 3:07 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Link

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-sees-a-future-without-bittorrent-071030/

Haha. Trent Reznor is a copyright violating OiNK user:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/10/trent_reznor_and_saul_williams.html

lol

funny the only thing you ever heard abt oink was like people begging for invites on message boards then they get busted and it turns out everyone in the world was a member

i gave an invite to someone in a pretty hueg band

Trent Reznor: 'It was like the world's greatest record store'

So w/r/t all the new multitudes of OiNK replacement sites cropping up everywhere, has anyone noticed a preponderance of jazz uploaders on any one of the new ones? I would be interested, from a purely academic point of view, to know if the bulk of that is going to one tracker or another. The enormous range of jazz on OiNK, e.g. Mosaic sets and RVG editions, always warmed my heart.

I mean, when my friend showed them to me. Because I didn't download them. *cough*

It would be interesting to see a listing of all the albums that were available on OINK at the end. I hear people talking about the enormous range, but I'm curious just how vast it was.

there was never anything, no matter how obscure, that I couldn't find there, with enough seeders that it downloaded in a few minutes.

see now i wish i had actually tried it.

Wow, Trent's comments are actually some of the most sensible I've read so far about OiNK.

he's biting dj /rupture.

reznor can afford to pay, the dick.

there was never anything, no matter how obscure, that I couldn't find there

this was quite far from my experience and i don't think my tastes are particularly obscure.

yeah, that's def an overstatement, but doesn't change the fact that it dwarfed the selection of any record shop, online or not

and the request system did work well enough for records not on the tracker, i had a new request filled about once or twice a week on average. interesting too, because the request system didn't run based on incentive like the ratio system

yeah, that's def an overstatement, but doesn't change the fact that it dwarfed the selection of any record shop, online or not

Hmm ... I'm fairly sure Amazon offered a far bigger catalogue overall, even if OINK was more focussed on things I might want.

oh you're right, i misspoke

There was about 215000 torrents on oink, I think.

mmmmmmmm waffles

There's a RIAA message on what.cd after you login, apparently.

Oh, and demonoid is gone.

that riaa message on what was a hack.
They've been getting haxxored all day.

Prince to sue The Pirate Bay http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9814504-7.html?tag=nefd.blgs

yes, waffles ftw.

mmm i used to have an oink account, and i mailed waffles about it, with some proof included. never heard anything back from them. is it up and running?

you may want to check the waffles invites thread on I Rate Everything. just search ilx 'waffles invites'

Dear registered user of the site What.cd,

We have recently been investigating the activities of the users of the
site http://www.what.cd/ and we have found that this site exists for the
sole purpose of music piracy.

Pirating music is a criminal offence and we believe it should be obvious
to you that the results outweigh the benefits - hard working artists
won't be rewarded for their work and will stop producing music,
ultimately leading to a severely reduced selection of music both in the
shops and for download.

The RIAA had hoped that the disabling by the police of the large illegal
music site, Oink.cd, would stop a lot of people from engaging in piracy,
as they don't want to be seen as criminals. However, this appears to
not be the case, as two large new sites have sprung up in its place.

This email is the final warning to all of you who were members of
Oink.cd and are current members of What.cd. If we find you to be
committing any more criminal acts of piracy then we will have to press
charges against you, as representatives of the major record companies of
America.

Yours Faithfully,

The RIAA

That e-mail is fake as the day is long.
They've been getting hacked by a 14 yr old kid who spoofed the e-mail to say r1aa.org (by the way, the real r1aa's domain is registered as a .com) and what.cd members should change their e-mails, passwords and passkeys.

days are actually really short now

So it's fake in the Northern Hemisphere, you're telling us?

I knew someone would say that days are short now!

But yes, the e-mails are very very fake. since when is the r1aa "faithfully yours"? They are not faithful.

#9747 by (orphaned) at 2007-10-29 23:56:47 GMT
BS. Theres no way 8 songs is 28mb.

This is no doubt a transcode.

God I miss OiNK...

#9751 by (orphaned) at 2007-10-30 00:05:43 GMT
I downloaded the first file, it shows up as 128k.

THIS IS A PIECE OF SHIT AND I CAN'T EVEN REPORT IT.

THIS TORRENT SUCKS DICK AND SO DOES THIS SITE.

#14546 by SevenTwo (n00b) at 2007-11-14 01:18:18 GMT
Ah man...bad quality..

#17263 by IloveRedBull (n00b) at 2007-11-23 14:36:53 GMT
terrrrriiibbblleee quality...

#20843 by twostoned (Power User) at 2007-12-11 00:25:00 GMT
RIP OiNK
28/09/07

haha where is that from

comments from a torrent on stmusic.0rg