OiNK! Goes the Music Fans

This past week, OiNK creator, Alan Ellis, was found Not Guilty to conspiracy to defraud the music industry!

It's Amazing, simply amazing. Hopefully this will hold up against the ignorant/greedy record companies, RIAA, IFPI and all the rest while they attack P2P music communities. See the article below for some details.
http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-found-not-guilty-walks-free-100115/

Curious to see your thoughts on the trial or topic itself.

For those who don't know about OiNK, here's the short story.
OiNK was one of the first huge music-dedicated private torrent trackers.
Eventually their reputation caught up with them and the whole question of legality came into play. The site was shut down by authorities and their big wigs were charged. Alan Ellis was the creator of OiNK and was charged with conspiracy to defraud the music industry.
The trial finally ended this past week. He was found not guilty.
http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-found-not-guilty-walks-free-100115/

regardless of your stance on file sharing, i think it's ridiculous to go after the torrent sites themselves, as opposed to those sharing the torrents. the torrent sites are nothing more than search engines --- they host no illegal files. they simply provide a service for searching for others who have those illegal files shared.

by the same logic, google allows me to search for illegal files on the internet. and, for the record, i HAVE used google to search for items (music, images, software, etc.) which are copyrighted.

i am not familiar with oink, but i used to use piretabay back in the day. it's a somewhat similar case.

Comparing google to OiNK is definitely not a good comparison. I have recently used google to look up directions, baseball player statistics, and actually came across this very site via google. You can do none of these things with OiNK. OiNK was created specifically to search for copyrighted files only, which is a huge difference compared to google.

I am not sure how on earth the jury decided that he was not guilty, I think it is pretty clear he is guilty of running it for profit. That being said, it doesn't bother me that he was found not guilty, since it did not have a negative impact on sales.

well the whole point is that on a P2P network, you can find anything you want. copyrighted material or non copyrighted material. you can find public domain and freeware programs on P2P networks, along side with copyrighted and pirated files. the whole point is that, oink itself is not committing any specific crime. oink is not hosting files and distributing them. oink is a search engine. maybe not oink specifically like i said, i am not familiar with oink, but this is how most P2P sites operate.

you found this site on google because you were searching google for something like this. but at the same time you could also use google for nefarious reasons. it just depends on what you search for. same with any search engine. the P2P site i use regularly promotes and advocates music submitted to them by its own members. so in that way i discovered a band who is openly sharing their music on this search engine. BUT, at the same time, if i searched for miley cirus, i could easily download her albums for free.

so yes, you used google to find this website (which operates at a profit) to provide you with guitar chords. BUT you could also use google to find a website that will give you a scan of a copyrighted book that has guitar chords in it that normally retails for $19.99 at the book store.

but i think the biggest question here is : what was oink accused of? "conspiracy to defraud the music industry"? that seems like a vague charge to me. notice how he was not accused of actual piracy --- because the website itself is not hosting or distributing copyrighted material; its users may be though. and under the DMCA a website owner can't be charged for content/actions of its users (although the website owner has to remove copyrighted/illegal material upon notification of its original copyright owner, but then again i am not familiar with the oink website.)