Police in Cleveland have arrested five men and a woman in relation to the previously reported BitTorrent file sharing website OiNK, which was closed down by the same police force last year. As previously reported, OiNK provided registered members with links to wide catalogues of unlicensed content, including an awful lot of music, and was especially notorious as a place albums were made available sometime before their official release.
Although music industry trade bodies like the BPI assisted the authorities in the anti-piracy attack on OiNK, the fact it was a police-led initiative put the whole thing on a different level to much previous anti-file sharing action. The six people targeted this week – seemingly for using rather than running the file sharing network – were the first individual UK users to actually be arrested for illegally sharing content online. Another man was arrested last October when the site was closed down in relation to operating OiNK. All seven people are now on bail pending further investigations on allegations of high level copyright infringement.
Commenting on the police action in relation to OiNK, the BPI, who have often led previous anti-P2P action, told reporters: "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".