OINK Probs???

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.