I just can’t understand the logic of taking down a site like oink.cd. It was an absolutely free way for labels to distribute their tracks and be exposed to 180 thousand music lovers. No hosting, no bandwidth, no hassles.

Why couldnt they offer a comprimise and ask users to pay some kind of monthly fee. From the outcry of oink users I am sure most would have been happy to pay around $30 a month? what’s $30 by 180000? well it’s a hell of a lot more then they would have been getting anyway!

So instead of approaching the oink owner in a civilized business manour and proposing to help him expand the site, mainting quality and impress 180000 people with their forwared thinking they took something a lot of people love and threatened every user with possible legal action.

http://torrentfreak.com/oink-database-didnt-self-destruct-wasnt-encrypted-but-users-safe-071025/

Music software is tougher because the cost is greater, I think — at least *per product*. (Some people spend far more money on music than on software, if they buy enough albums at a time.) So, in that case it comes back to perceiving value when you make the investment, which is going to be vital to sealing the deal even without the threat of piracy. I’m just glad we don’t have the country-by-country restrictions on music software that you get with, say, Heroes(!)

but I personally suspect laziness on the part of the industry and UK/Europe authorities

I suspect it was merely a hittable target which was visible above the horizon. So rather than laziness I expect it was actually do-ableness which drove this raid. UK police are not going to travel to Sweden or China, Middlesbrough is much more do-able.

I’m going to re-iterate the related point about users too. Why do users go to Pirate sites?

Now for some reason everyone starts bickering terrible pointless nonsense like : “why do you steal my music” and “everything should be free man” which is a pretty senseless exploration of the general motive to piracy here.

I contend that for the majority of non-hardened users pirate sites simply offer convenience. Many ‘users’ of such services would happily pay for the service, but the pirate (in many cases) provides a simpler path. That simple convenience may be a burnt CD provided by a friend, or it might be typing ‘Robbie Williams’ in a well publicised torrent site.

Peter suggested that the police were lazy in their targeting. My point is : Everyone is lazy, everyone just needs to get to point B via the simplest route.
But that doesn’t mean they are against paying.

An example of inconvenience & the barrier to payment - tonight I wanted to watch the latest episode of ‘Heroes’. Now I would pay about £1 for this without a grumble, that seems fair to me.
Can anyone direct me to an official method where I can watch that latest episode in the UK ? (IE not the NBC site, because that blocks non US IP addresses) . Nope
But I do know of an ‘illegal’ TV streaming site or two which are more convenient.

There we have our classic situation, neither black nor white: I just watched Heroes online illegally and I do not feel bad about it, but I would have paid NBC for it if it was possible.

Of course my point “convenience is the primary barrier to converting users to paying” will now get totally buried by people shouting either “you stole things! you killed my brother!11!!” or alternatively “everything should be free man” so, you know, just carry on throwing rocks at each other for being human.

OiNK was also extremely exhaustive. You could quite literally find anything on there. With public trackers you are bound to find something that you cannot download for free at some point. There was no such problem with OiNK. While a lot of people used such power “responsibly” there were probably a greater number of users who just saw it as a leechfest, likely people who came in recently after OiNK increased the number of invites that users with positive ratios received.

I do miss the community aspect of it. There was one user who uploaded Japanese indie rock albums, most being limited CD-R only releases… some amazing stuff that I would never have heard in my life if not for the site. That was OiNK at its best.