Shut-down and Media Response
Following a joint operation codenamed Operation Ark Royal, between Interpol, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), and some other organisations, on 23 October 2007 the site was closed. The site's creator, Alan Ellis, was arrested by British police, and Dutch police confiscated OiNK's hosting service company NForce's servers. The e-mail addresses of the site's members were not encrypted and were therefore available to the authorities, however, members' passwords were only stored as a salted md5 hash. Data stored on OiNK's servers was, however, insufficient to incriminate OiNK users.
Jeremy Banks, head of the IFPI's Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, opined that OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music, and that the site had leaked over 60 major album releases in 2007. The shut-down was covered in media worldwide mainly based on IFPI, BPI and Cleveland Police's press releases and original BBC news footage of the arrest of Ellis.
The British and Dutch Pirate Parties issued a joint statement condemning the actions as retaliatory, questioning the ethics of choreographing it and letting representatives of the alleged victims participate in the investigation.
In the days following the arrest, when news sources like Wired, The Guardian, and Slyck.com started fact checking based on internet sources, it was revealed that not everything reported in the mainstream media was entirely correct. Common errors quoted by media were: that OiNK was an extremely lucrative website and made hundreds of thousands of pounds from "donations", which users had to pay to be able to download; that users had to offer new content to the site in order to get invitations; and that the site was centered around the release of pre-released material. The first two claims clearly conflicted with site's written rules and conventions. A counter argument for the third was that only a tiny portion of site's content were pre-released material. TechCrunch wrote that while links to pre-release albums definitely appeared on OiNK early it was unlikely that the site's members were actually responsible for these releases and claim this shows how poorly the scene is understood.
After OiNK was raided, several new BitTorrent Trackers were set up by former members of the site.
Read more about this topic: Oi NK
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