First British Arrests Made For Illegal File-Sharing - Six Former Members Of OiNK
by 
Dave Parrack on June 3rd, 2008
Arrests over illegal file-sharing are as common as muck over in the States, with the RIAA (Recording Industry Association Of America) cracking down on all forms of alleged content theft against record labels and recording artists. However, in the UK, we have been spared the legal ramifications of file sharing, at least until now.
Oink’s Pink Palace was a BitTorrent tracker which specialised in pre-release album files. The site was shut down last October by British police. At the time of its closure, the site had 180,000 members, all of whom were there by invite-only, and most of which helped keep the site running by making a donation.
On Friday, TorrentFreak reported that an arrest had been made over claims of file-sharing on the site. This has since been confirmed by Cleveland police, and there was actually six people arrested in connection with the case. The arrested people include five men aged between 19 and 33, along with a 28-year-old woman.
All six suspects were arrested for Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry over the downloading and sharing of pre-release material, and taken in for questioning. They were all interviewed and fingerprinted before being released on bail.
This seems to have been a joint operation by the police and the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) who gave a statement to The Register which read:
The BPI and IFPI worked with the police in order to close down the OiNK tracker site last October. The illegal online distribution of music, particularly pre-release, is hugely damaging, and as OiNK was the biggest source for pre-releases at the time we moved to shut it down. We provided the information to assist this investigation, but this is now a police matter and we are unable to comment further at this stage.
Although this may not mean much to anyone in the US where arrests of this nature are common, it’s big news here in the UK for British citizens who have so far seemed to have some kind of immunity to charges related to illegal file-sharing and copyright theft.
This case will be worth watching to its ultimate conclusion, which depending on whether the authorities are seeking to make an example of these unfortunate scapegoats or not could see a high profile court case and big fines. If the result is anything of that nature, then I suspect a sense of fear will go around the file-sharing community in the UK.
[Photo Source: Wesley Fryer at Flickr]
Tags: BitTorrent, bpi, Brit, British, File Sharing, Illegal File Sharing, OiNK, RIAA, UK| 2.5 |
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POSTED IN: Announcements, Industry, News, Op Ed
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