Police, IFPI make bacon of OiNK BitTorrent tracker
By Nate Anderson
October 23, 2007 - 01:25PM CT

The invite-only music site OiNK will grunt and snuffle no more after police seized the site's servers and arrested a 24-year-old UK man. The IFPI is now crowing over the bust and the closure of the "primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music." IFPI and BPI, the UK music trade group, spent two years investigating the private BitTorrent tracker and worked with police in both the UK and the Netherlands to shut the site down.

The servers, based in Amsterdam, were grabbed last week, but the alleged administrator of the site was just picked up near Middlesborough in the UK. OiNK specialized in leaking albums; IFPI estimates that the site had a membership of 180,000 "hard-core file sharers" who had to prove their worthiness to join the site by providing leaked demos or rough mixes of hot upcoming releases. The site didn't charge a membership fee, but it did accept donations.

The Cleveland police, which conducted the UK raid, claim that "hundreds of thousands of pounds" were being made by the operators and then stashed in various bank accounts. OiNK's address, oddly enough, is oink.cd. The site was previously experiencing DNS problems and eventually decided that the solution was to use an address belonging to the Congo.

Now the domain throws up a gray screen with the IFPI and BPI logos. Above those is a warning message about how the site has been closed as the result of a criminal investigation into "suspected illegal music distribution." Will other invite-only tracker sites and darknets take the hint?

Ars Technica
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