When it comes to file-sharing lawsuits the UK remains calm

In today's day and age it's pretty rare for the owner of a large-scale copyright-infringement website to escape the law. They can run, but they can't hide! The cases are often settled out of court, but when they do go to trial it's incredibly uncommon to see a not guilty verdict. But that all changes today! Go UK! The owner of Oink, one of the largest British-run file-sharing sites, has walked free.

Alan Ellis ran the site between May 2004 and October 2007, first from his home and then later from dedicated servers in Amsterdam. At its peak the community and its private BitTorrent tracker had 180,000 users. Its shut-down was orchestrated by British and Dutch police after a two-year investigation by the IFPI and BPI -- this was by no means a small-time operation! That Ellis is walking away is really quite an achievement, both for him and the British legal system: he simply told the court that he had no intention to defraud copyright holders. When asked why he set the site up, while giving evidence, he said: "It was to further my skills. To better my skills for employability."

I'll end with a great quote from Oink's Wikipedia entry; it was said by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails:

"I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made Oink a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If Oink cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now."

Tags: bittorrent, british, dutch, oink, p2p, piracy, police, uk