According to TorrentFreak, British police have arrested a former user of the private torrent tracker OiNK for uploading and seeding a single album. There was word that police are currently questioning others and more arrests seem likely.
The popular tracker was shutdown in late 2007, and the British authorities made the claim that they would be investigating, not anti-piracy agencies such as the RIAA, MPAA, or BREIN. Until today though, no one has been charged with anything, that even includes OiNK founder and admin Alan Ellis.
The man arrested, who was from the Cheshire area, was questioned and later released on police bail. He has no prior convictions or arrests and is in trouble for uploading a single album early last year.
The bigger questions however, are why the arrest happened now, for such a trivial user, and whether the charges will stick. There was no commercial gain for the user, and his only crime may be that the album was a pre-release, meaning it hit the Internet days or weeks before the actual street date.
We will keep you updated.
Result for: british authorities
The British authorities have confirmed that at least 6 former users of the torrent site OiNK have been arrested, more than the single user that was reported on Friday.
All of those arrested were pre-release uploaders, people who shared full albums days or weeks before the official retail date. The arrest were all made between May 23rd and May 28th and include 5 men and 1 woman, all aged between 19 and 33.
Allegedly, all suspects were arrested on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry” and were fingerprinted and forced to leave DNA samples.
The BPI left a statement about the matter, but for now most of the details remain vague. “The BPI and IFPI worked with the police in order to close down the OiNK tracker site last October. The illegal online distribution of music, particularly pre-release, is hugely damaging, and as OiNK was the biggest source for pre-releases at the time we moved to shut it down. We provided the information to assist this investigation, but this is now a police matter and we are unable to comment further at this stage.”
