The legal case against the people behind that OiNK BitTorrent tracker service should finally come to court this month. As you'll remember, OiNK was a community of file-sharers providing links to all kinds of unlicensed movie and music content, often prior to official release. Responding to objections from content owners, the UK police took action and closed the site down, seizing the operation's servers and arresting key people involved.
According to a posting at OiNK.cd, which used to be the home of the file sharing service, the operation's administrator, Alan Ellis, has been charged with conspiracy to defraud and will face the charges at a Magistrates Court on 24 Sep. The case will then proceed to the Crown Court on a to be determined date.
Reports also suggest that individuals who uploaded large amounts of unlicensed content and provided links to that content via the OiNK network also face similar charges, though there is no confirmation as to how many such people have been charged, or when they will go to court.
Ellis will presumably argue that he did not personally host any illegal content on his servers, rather he simply provided links to other people's illegal content. This defence has had limited success in courts elsewhere in the world, but I don't think it has been properly tested in the British courts as yet.
But there is certainly precedent in other jurisdictions where the administrators of BitTorrent trackers have been found guilty of widespread infringement. In the US earlier this year Daniel Dove, the administrator of the long defunct EliteTorrents tracker, was found guilty of criminal copyright infringement and earlier this month was sentenced to 18 months in jail and a $20,000 fine, though some legal experts say he got off lightly, given he could have got up to ten years in jail and a $150,000 fine. It remains to be seen was English judges make of the BitTorrent tracker phenomenon.