OiNK Admin’s Bail Extended for Second Time

UK police need more time for its computer forensics team to dig up enough evidence for trial.

It’s been almost 4 long months now that the BitTorrent world watched in horror as the venerable music tracker site OiNK was shut down by UK and Dutch authorities.

After the dust settled the site’s admin, Alan Ellis, a 24-year-old IT worker from Middlesbrough, was arrested for suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement.

The difficulty authorities face in making successful arguments is made plain by the fact that this is the second time that UK police have asked for an extension of Ellis’s bail. The initial deadline for them to finish gathering evidence and to decide whether or not to bring charges was December 21st. However, in early in December they asked for an extension which expired yesterday.

Both are ludicrous arguments for both defy the facts clearly before authorities. As Ellis himself has pointed out, OiNK merely pointed users to content much like other indexing sites like Google, Yahoo and others. Holding him accountable for what the site’s links pointed to would mean a drastic shift in both copyright laws as well as the way Internet sites are expected to behave.

"If this goes to court it is going to set a huge precedent." Ellis told The Telegraph. "It will change the internet as we know it."

The second offense allegedly pertains to the site’s donations mechanism in which users contributed to the site to pay for server costs, hosting fees, etc.. UK authorities insist that the site was a money making scheme that was "extremely lucrative."

"Members paid donations via debit or credit cards, ensuring their continued access to the site," reads a press release that followed the raid. "The payments were received electronically into the web site company accounts."

"This is big business, with hundreds of thousands of pounds being made."

Their claims are clearly false for as ANY UPSTANDING MEMBER of OiNK will point out, not the IFPI rat who infiltrated the site, that donations were strictly voluntary. Sharing music, a la a BitTorrent share-ratio, was the only measure of continued membership on the site and no amount of donated money could undo poor seeding habits or other infractions of OiNKs rules.

So it’s no surprise that UK authorities need more time to come up with a case. Both of their charges so far are weak to say the least.