BitTorrent Site Promises to Bring Back OiNK
The Pirate Bay said Friday that it was working on bringing back OiNK, a BitTorrent tracker that featured music files from "hundreds of thousands" of music albums.
OiNK was taken down on October 23 by police in the Netherlands and Britain in conjunction with the IFPI and BPI, and a message on the site's front page indicates that an investigation was ongoing into the "identities and activities" of its users.
However, the BitTorrent community has chosen to fight back, opening another site called BOiNK which is expected to be live within the next several days. The original owners of OiNK are not involved, nor are any other BitTorrent sites.
"The most important thing about BOiNK is perhaps the message it sends out to the IFPI and the BPI: It shows that that if you stop one tracker, others will pop up days after," Ernesto wrote for TorrentFreak. "It is a hydra. Call it a slap in the face if you want."
On Tuesday, British police arrested a 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough, a British city in east central Britain. Authorities are questioning the man on counts of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement, and his employer as well as the home of his father were also search as part of the raid.
The site's servers were reportedly seized in Amsterdam last week, although the site was functional until the man's arrest on Tuesday. OiNK was reportedly responsible for leaking up to 60 pre-release music albums during this year alone.
"OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure," IFPI anti-piracy chief Jeremy Banks said in a statement. "This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.