A joint effort between officials in the UK and Holland, supported by the BPI, the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry and those Interpol chaps (the international police authority, not the New York indie rock combo) have closed down a popular BitTorrent tracking service called OiNK, or the Oink Pink Palace if you prefer.
OiNK was an invitation-only file sharing community that had an estimated membership of 180,000, and which directed its members to large numbers of BitTorrent sources of music and other content. Needless to say, the vast majority of those sources were illegal. OiNK was especially well known in file sharing and anti-piracy circles as one of the first places leaked pre-release albums would appear on the net, with the IFPI claiming the site was responsible for leaking 60 major album releases this year alone (in reality OiNK itself didn't leak them, its members did - albums are generally leaked in multiple places at the same time, but OiNK's popularity among file-sharers meant it was the most consistent place for information on pre-release albums leaking online).
Dutch authorities say they seized servers used by the service in Amsterdam last week, though the community continued to run seemingly unaffected by that raid. But yesterday police in Middlesbrough raided the home and work place of the man allegedly behind the operation, and subsequently arrested him. The site went offline soon after, and the oink.cd domain now takes you to a message from the BPI and IFPI.
The IFPI declared the closure of OiNK as "important victory in the industry's bid to tackle copyright theft", with the body's chief John Kennedy telling reporters: "We're very pleased with this development. This was a huge site, a source of many problems. We got the site down, it looks like there are consequences for those involved in it, and I suspect it will give us a lot of information which we would like to further assess."
BPI boss Geoff Taylor added: "The government is now well aware of the scale of damage this theft causes to music - copyright theft starves the creative industries of income, which both threatens future investment in artists and vandalises our culture. That this individual now faces criminal charges will deter some but no doubt others will be looking move into this territory, and the authorities must keep up the pressure to deter the digital freeloaders".
A spokesman for Cleveland Police, who made the arrest, described OiNK as a "lucrative scheme" implying the people behind the service were charging for and profiting from the service - a fact that is being disputed in blog-land where users of the service say that payments were voluntary and went to cover the cost of running the OiNK servers rather than providing profits to any individuals. That said, there is no question that the content the service provided access to was nothing but illegal.