First Brits to Be Arrested for Illegally Sharing Music

Illegal file sharing starts to come with a high price in UK. Six persons have been detained for illegally swapping music files. The arrests were made late last month by Cleveland Police and “Conspiracy to defraud the music industry” was the offense that the six ex-members of now defunct BitTorrent tracker OiNK.cd were accused of. They “managed” to be the first Brits ever to be accused on these grounds (compared to their fellow Americans who have been under a constant pursuit from RIAA and MPAA for quite some time now).

The offenders are five men aged 19 to 33, and a 28-year-old woman.

OiNK’s popularity was due to it having one of the most wide-ranging networks of music sharing online. Moreover, the users themselves were notorious for only allowing high-quality rips of an album to be uploaded.

OiNK.cd was brought down as a result of a police raid at the home of its administrator, 24-year old Middlesbrough-based IT worker Alan Ellis. The police confiscated then the servers of the invitation-only website which were returned later after they had been “cleaned”.

The British music industry "enforcer" the BPI commented:

"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."