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Illegal download site shut down in police raid

Interpol help leads to arrest of 24-year-old Middlesbrough man

October 23, 2007 | 2 Comments

One of the world’s biggest websites for pre-release illegal downloads, OiNK, has been shut down by police, and its alleged owner has been arrested.

OiNK was a subscription-based website with over 180,000 members, and made money through users paying voluntary donations.

Cleveland police worked with Interpol in the raid, which culminated in the arrest of a 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough – the alleged organiser of OiNK – and the seizure of the website’s servers in Amsterdam.

OiNK provided major release albums before their scheduled release dates, which relied on users sharing music with each other using peer-to-peer program BitTorrent.

Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of the British Phonographic Industry, said he hoped the authorities would keep applying pressure on illegal downloaders.

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Comments (2)

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markmacmillan

Oct 23, 2007

I don't support illegal downloading at all, but we all know there are still millions of sites out there. It will be impossible for the police to shut down every one and prevent any new ones from cropping up. That is the disadvantage with the internet.

Darrel Revek

Oct 31, 2007

OiNK want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.