OiNK Creator Found Not Guilty in File-Sharing Case

In a decision that seems rare these days, common sense has prevailed in one illegal file-sharing case. The first person in the UK to go to court over file-sharing-related charges has been acquitted of the innovative 'conspiracy to defraud' the music industry, a turn-around of similar high-profile cases like the Pirate Bay trial. Alan Ellis, the owner and creator of the popular, now defunct, OiNK BitTorrent indexer and tracker was found not guilty and cleared of all charges. There is no possibility to appeal the decision.

OiNK operated since 2004 until 2007 when a police raid shut down the operation. At that time, it had become rather popular with a reported 200,000 users downloading 21 million songs. Part of its uniqueness and appeal was that it was a private tracker, which focused on the quality of the content rather than getting as many users and material as possible. The site was invite-only and members were asked to make donations in order to get invites to hand out to their friends.

It is this last part that the prosecution lawyers claimed made Ellis a rich man. The lawyers argued that commercial gain was the sole purpose of the operation and that the police found more than $300,000 in his PayPal account set up to receive the donations and that he made over $18,000 a month from them. Ellis admitted he had £20,000 spread over ten bank accounts when the police came after him. This was clear evidence that Ellis' intentions were to profit from the work of others, the prosecution said.

In his defense, Ellis said he created the site to hone his coding skills in light of future employment opportunities. He said that the site had been originally built on a template that had a BitTorrent component. The greatest argument, though, was that the site itself didn't host any unlawful material and the users had the only responsibility on what they shared with others and what they downloaded. The jury agreed with that, as it turns out, and voted unanimously to have him freed of all charges.