The excuse?

“OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online”

Which of course it’s not under discussion that this guys have it all wrong, but somehow it seems that they’re gonna make everything they can to give this case a hard time. I believe that OiNK’s administrator can protect himself from much of the accusations because of the nature of this technology as we all know, but somehow, authorities are accusing that this website was “encouraging people to upload copyrighted material”, which of course is stupid, but hey… They’re doing it.

A part of me has died today, I hope that OiNK survives this along with The PirateBay, Demonoid and Suprnova, all of them trackers that were brought up to the authorities in the last year or two.

More news and details found here. Via GigWise. Image: TorrentFreak

Update: Official press release (Damn you!)

Update 2: OiNK’s home page displays this advice: “A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users”

What really interests me is that years ago the only way to tell if an artist was popular was record sales, but today there are lots of people that use P2P networks as an “on-demand radio station” which, pointing the obvious, can be tracked and measured rather than the traditional radio, in which you don’t really know if someone who has the device on is really listening or cooking breakfast for the kids.

As Eduardo puts it, having an intensive research on music trends can be quite expensive, but watching the activity on P2P networks suddenly seems like a friendly idea, even though P2P is still “the enemy”. Perhaps, if record labels are so into these networks, we are close to finding a way to keep it free to users and make these companies earn some money from their contents, because its pretty darn obvious that the labels can be benefited from this new way of consuming:

In a business, this type of market foresight can be invaluable. Nearly always leading to more profits, customers feel happier and more satisfied with the products they are offered, leading to greater loyalty longer-term.

Link. Via ALT1040