Bad Vibrations

This has been a bad day. In case you haven’t heard, Oink.cd (formerly Oink.me.uk) has been raided and shut down. In an Interpol organized swoop, oink’s servers were seized in Amsterdam and police raided the home and workplace of the site founder and admin, Oink. There is a pixelated photo on the BBC of him being led out of his house, arms handcuffed behind his back. That is one haunting photo.

For those who never knew the pleasures of the pink wonderland that was oink, it was, undoubtedly, the greatest thing since sliced Napster. As Tina Turner said of the site, it was “simply the best”. She went on to say that she preferred it to any of it’s alternatives. *cough*

Hugely picky about the quality and tagging of the uploads, Oink brought music downloading out of the complete mess that so many of you know well from the likes of limewire. What were sometimes referred to as harsh ratio rules kept everyone uploading, desperate to try to keep to a 1:1 download to upload ratio. Those who were banned were not allowed back in. Your account was deactivated if you were inactive for over 30 days. Unless you were a power user+, like me . Never, on oink, never would you download a mislabeled track, one that popped or clicked at all, and as as comment on Digg read “Oink was one of those places where if you couldn’t find something in a search, it probably didn’t exist in the first place”. The number one rule on the site was that you must have a cute avatar. There were threads for people to query whether their avatar was cute enough. OiNK rocked.

I had been a member for over 2 years, from back in the days when there were less than 30,000 members. In the last year the site grew tremendously, up to about 180,000 members, and became far more high profile than it had been before. There were over 60 prerelease album leaks this year alone, and that was quite likely what brought the authorities knocking on the door. Or kicking it in rather.

The homepage has now been replaced with a non-pink scaremongering page. “A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users”. Ohh. Scary. I will literally punch the entire prosecution team in the face if I get brought to court. Anyway, it’s not going to happen. Don’t be put off by this fellow music communists. You don’t need justification to listen to music. I’ve got plenty though. I personally download music because I disagree with the invasion of Iraq. That’s for the American labels. As for the English labels, let me just say this. 800 years.

I’m not going to launch into the issues of intellectual copyright in the 21st century, but me just say, nobody on OiNK actually stole anything. They just listened to sequences of ones and zeros that just happened to resemble (accidentally) the series of of ones and zeros that record labels were selling in the shops. That’s all.

011000110101010101. There. That’s my number, I copyright it. Enjoy it? I thought so. If anyone else uses it, or in fact just looks at it without paying me my dues, I will sue them. You got a sample there, but if you save that number, my lawyers will come knocking. I have your IP. I’m serious. Otherwise you’re stealing my genius. a wah wah wah. If you want to buy the number to look at in your own time it is 20 euro please. Oh I forgot to mention, I conceptualized the number, wrote it down and made it everything it is, but still I’m only getting about 15 percent of the profits, the rest goes to the number label I’m with. There’s no good reason for that, of course, other than feeding the bureaucrats, but theres no way around it in this industry. That price, by the way, will never go down, even when the recording (..) costs and marketing are long paid for. Hell, it won’t even change a penny when I die. And if it becomes a classic, they will start jacking the price up, like The White Album.

But enough ridiculousness. What is interesting me is where the 180,000 strong Oink community are going to move to. Although most BT users would be members of multiple trackers, while oink was around it was really all you needed. Now that it’s not, I wonder where everyone will go. As much as everyone keeps saying “there’ll be plenty more popping up”, I’d say it will be quite a while before such an organised tracker shows its head.

Jeremy Banks, head of the IFPI, stated that Oink was a highly lucrative business (NEVER did oink request money from it’s members, and it hardly gave any advantages to the few who decided to donate to keep the servers running) and generally painted OiNK as the SS. “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure” he said.

That’s exactly what it was, Jeremy, you pansy.

I found so many bands, fell in love with new artists, discovered genres I would have never gotten into, and overall listened to more music than I would ever have been able to afford without it. My dad used OiNK. That’s how great it was.

I almost feel like a friend has died.

So long OiNK. We’ll miss you

~ by coimheadai on October 23, 2007.