Torrentfreak.com: British Police Confirm Six OiNK Users Arrested

[Submission]

Read about it here:

http://torrentfreak.com/british-poli...rrests-080602/


British Police have just confirmed that several users of BitTorrent site OiNK were arrested recently. TorrentFreak broke the news last Friday after sitting on the story for a while but the mainstream press have been holding back over the weekend, waiting for confirmation. Just seconds ago, confirmation came.

[dunson]

British Police Confirm Six OiNK Users Arrested
Written by enigmax on June 02, 2008
British Police have just confirmed that several users of BitTorrent site OiNK were arrested recently. TorrentFreak broke the news last Friday after sitting on the story for a while but the mainstream press have been holding back over the weekend, waiting for confirmation. Just seconds ago, confirmation came.


Last week TorrentFreak reported that Cleveland Police had arrested a user of OiNK, who was questioned and later released on police bail.

We also discovered that other people had been arrested and deduced from our sources that this police action was taken against alleged pre-release uploaders - those that share before the retail date.

A few minutes ago in an email to TorrentFreak, Cleveland Police confirmed that a total of six individuals were arrested, all in connection with the uploading of pre-release music.

Three of the arrests were made on Friday 23rd May and three more on Wednesday 28th May. The arrested individuals are five men aged between 19 and 33, and a 28-year-old woman.

Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. According to our sources, they were arrested on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry” although this hasn’t yet been confirmed by the police.

We can confirm that at least two of the arrests are for the alleged uploading of a single album. All have been bailed pending further enquiries.

Update: The Register contacted the BPI who gave this statement:

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.

[markupmaster]

I may be wrong but shouldn't this be in the news section?

Sad news by the way..

[Polarbear]

the pre-releases on oink mainly came from the scene. there were hardly any homerip pre-releases. most of them were detected as transcodes and deleted.

99% of the pre-releases were taken from 0-day sites and uploaded to oink. to describe oink as "the biggest source for pre-releases" is just ridiculous.

by the way. the record industry spreads those releases itself. the scene didn't break into the artist studio and ripped the masters.

it pisses them off that they can't go after the scene, so they try to build a ridiculous precedent-setting case. fortunately even the music industry can't criminalise a huge part of the society which decide to share their music online. there are millions who do it.

they are just afraid that a larger group of people that are not well paid music journalists or lame ass radio djs might in fact realise in advance that they publish crap.

i'm quite confident that those greedy capitalist pigs will get their asses whooped in court, because they having nothing against their victims in legal terms.

they represent an industrial complex which has nothing to do with music as an art form.

[mshassy]

damn this is really really bad
fucking CRIA bitches!

[cachorro96]

[TechnoMan80]

Does that means that all UK registered Company did/will
collaborate with the police to be ok with low ?

thats bit spooky

[DeFiler]

Police are going overboard with this...

[Gish]

sounds like a scare tactic to me.. I don't think anything serous will come of this. these people only had to answer questions, they were never brought up on charges!

[Tokeman]

Well in the USA agencies are all going overboard with lawsuits and scare tactics. Perhaps the British are just 'Gettin some while the gettin is good', following USA's examples...