UK Overreaction To OiNK Continues

from the typical-overreaction dept

Thu, Sep 11th 2008 7:11pm — Mike Masnick

About a year ago, we noted that the IFPI had continued its totally counterproductive game of whack-a-mole and convinced UK authorities to shut down the popular private BitTorrent tracker site, OiNK. The site was quite popular -- and even Trent Reznor noted how useful it was and how it filled a void in the music space that the industry wasn't filling. However, with every whack of a mole, it was only a matter of days until plenty of alternatives sprung up.

Since then, though, there's been some question about additional fallout from the closure, as authorities were arresting certain folks who used the site. While, authorities kept postponing filing actual charges, there was talk that they were going to charge them with "conspiracy to defraud the music industry," which sounds a lot like "felony interference of a business model" -- the mocking term we use whenever companies seem to think it's illegal for others to compete in their industry. And, make no mistake about it, as Reznor pointed out, OiNK was about filling a niche for music lovers, as a place to discover and learn about new music.

Well, now the other shoe has dropped, and the administrator of the site has, indeed, been charged with conspiracy to defraud while two users of the site, each of whom only uploaded a single CD, were charged with criminal copyright infringement. For a single CD upload. This all seems a bit extreme. Once again, the government is basically making criminal charges over what is really a business model issue. OiNK filled a needed void in the music industry -- one that the industry itself could fill if it wanted to. But, because it refuses to do so, that's somehow conspiracy to defraud the industry and people may go to jail for it. At some point, years from now when people recognize the promotional value of free music, they're going to look back at the industry (and authorities') overreaction to these sorts of things and shake their heads in amazement.

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Filed Under: conspiracy, copyright, oink, pre-release, recording industry, uk

11 Comments

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bobbknight, 12 Sep 2008 @ 12:22am

An Idea
An idea ie: intellectual property if not shared is like fallow in the field. I does no one any good.
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Lucretious, 12 Sep 2008 @ 3:01am

God I miss OiNK
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Greg, 12 Sep 2008 @ 5:56am

Wow, political leaders pursuing backwards and ineffective policies
I'm *so* shocked. This has *never* happened before. Usually it's incredibly well thought out and effective policies like the war on drugs and the war on terror. Oh, wait...
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hegemon13, 12 Sep 2008 @ 6:38am

Okay, this one I agree with
Despite my disagreement with TD on the GNR case (I felt that guy needed to be criminally charged because of the computer crime involved), I completely agree here. There was no attempt to defraud. That charge does not even make sense. And, uploading music you obtained legally, or even through infringement, is infringement, not theft. The level of charges here is tragic, as it is clear that three people will suffer punishment far beyond their crime just so that the government can make an example of them.

Yes, this does differ dramatically from the GNR case because, as far as we know, the two uploaders did not obtain the music by illegally hacking the band's server and stealing it.
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Isaac K (profile), 12 Sep 2008 @ 7:21am

I just fear
I just fear that the music companies will NOT learn their lesson, that they will CONTINUE to threaten torrent users as a method to cow the customer, and that their incessant appeals to the "good of man" in their well-oiled congressional machine will lead to ever more mposing violations of privacy rights.
I fear for the industry.
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Stirling Westrup, 12 Sep 2008 @ 10:49am

Minor Grammatical Nitpick.
Just want to point out that "OiNK filled a needed void in the music industry" would seem to imply that the void was necessary and that OiNK filling it was a BAD thing.
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another mike, 12 Sep 2008 @ 4:24pm

just admit it, it's illegal to be a music fan
it's worse than your average game of whack-a-mole because the recording industry is playing against a hydra. for every mole they smack, two more pop up to take its place.
and no one is defrauding the music industry. so long as people can carry a tune in a bucket, the music industry is doing fine. the recording industry is in the business of selling little plastic discs. if you think that's your market, you're boned.
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mightymaz, 14 Sep 2008 @ 8:47am

"...IFPI had continued its totally counterproductive game of whack-a-mole .."
Since IFPI have achieved all they set out to achieve it's a bit of a stretch to claim it's counter productive.
In the your imaginary world maybe a number of oink replacements would spring up and make the IFPI achievements pointless. But in the real world that didn't happen - e.g count the number of people writing in about how they miss oink.
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Mike (profile), 14 Sep 2008 @ 10:57pm

Re:
Since IFPI have achieved all they set out to achieve it's a bit of a stretch to claim it's counter productive.
In the your imaginary world maybe a number of oink replacements would spring up and make the IFPI achievements pointless. But in the real world that didn't happen - e.g count the number of people writing in about how they miss oink.

Just because they haven't all discovered them yet, doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means they're further underground.
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mightymaz, 15 Sep 2008 @ 12:17am

Re: Re:
Just because you don't know about them doesn't mean they really exist !
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Mike (profile), 15 Sep 2008 @ 3:13am

Re: Re: Re:
Just because you don't know about them doesn't mean they really exist !

Who says I don't know about them?
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