Gawker: valleywag, oink

Trent Reznor used shut-down music sharing site

Jordan Golson — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:48:21 EDT

Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman who encouraged his fans to steal music, had a favorite site to steal from. It was Oink, the music-sharing site that got shut down last week, as he told New York:

I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted... it existed because it filled a void of what people want.

Reznor also feels "hustled" when he visits iTunes. Maybe he'll donate to help The Pirate Bay build their BitTorrent replacement. (Photo by AP/Louis Lanzano)

Music file-sharing site Oink is rising from...

Mary Jane Irwin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:15:37 EDT

Music file-sharing site Oink is rising from its recently raided grave — sort of. The ever-defiant Pirate Bay is resurrecting it as Boink.cd. [TorrentFreak]

Alan Ellis, operator of the music sharing...

Tim Faulkner — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:45:04 EDT

Alan Ellis, operator of the music sharing site Oink, objects to his arrest and the shutdown of his site, over which roughly five million digital song files were transmitted daily: "The website is very different from how the police are making it out to be. There is no music sold on the site — I am doing nothing wrong." Funny, we thought music not being sold was exactly what the police were making out to be wrong. [The Daily Telegraph]

Pirates Everywhere Pour Out A Little For OiNK

jharv — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:22:31 EDT

Oh snap! Looks like all those "serious music aficionados" will have to argue about bitrates somewhere else now, because the combined might of British and Dutch law enforcement has shut down OiNK, the invite-only file-trading hub that had become the P2P-era equivalent of a Little Rascals treehouse fort with a sign that read "No 128KBps Allowed."

The raids, in Amsterdam and Middlesbrough, followed a two-year investigation into a members-only Web site, www.OiNK.cd, which allowed users to upload and download albums before their release.

An estimated 180,000 members of the site paid "donations" via debit or credit cards, ensuring that they could continue to access the site and its catalogue of music and other media.

The site provided access to more than 60 albums before their release this year, according to industry experts.

Wow, 180,000 members on lists probably now in the hands of the authorities during the international music industry's most litigious season in recent memory. Whoops! (Actually many of the news stories on OiNK's shutdown are getting the facts wrong—users didn't have to pay dues to remain an OiNK user; they just had to upload a shit-ton of music, so as to keep their upload-to-download ratio high enough.) Here's hoping that whatever user logs the cops have don't include any of the entitled boys and girls on this Digg thread:

This has to be a fucking joke.
I need my OiNK.

There, there...we all survived Audiogalaxy leaving us, and we'll all survive this. Promise.

Raids Target Music Piracy Site [Reuters]