This is the first of a 2-part post about the filesharing site OiNK. The 2nd part should be posted in the next week or so.
Anyone keeping up with filesharing news (or anyone who reads any of the popular social networking sites) will have certainly heard about the closing of OiNK. Since the site has been taken down, an old version of the site can be seen here. OiNK was one of the most popular private Bittorrent tracking sites around, mostly for its rarer released, but also because of the quality of releases and the community that had build up around the site.
Private trackers, as the name implies, are trackers that are not open to the general public. In some cases, private trackers will have open signup periods, but once a site has reached a certain level of maturity this is often stopped in favor of an invite-only system. So to have a membership at a site like OiNK (and any of numerous other private trackers) you need to get an invite from a current member of the community. In a couple years time OiNK grew to 180,000 members, approximately half of which were US based members and the rest scattered across the world.
Public trackers allow anyone to search their site for any torrent files they have indexed. Sites like Thepiratebay or BTJunkie derive their traffic from being freely open to the public. Most private trackers derive their traffic from targeting a niche market (though, with exception, even private trackers are generally not totally focused on a single thing). OiNK's niche market was rare and high-quality digital music. Due to rigorously enforced submission rules all files submitted to the site had to be genuine and follow certain guidelines for quality and labeling.
OiNK submitters provided hundreds of gigabytes of rare, hard to find music, and terabytes of their own bandwidth to share with other members of the community. Music files would often be submitted in high quality formats as well (generally avoided because of the size of such files). The difference is loss, or specifically lossy and lossless.
The digital music revolution started with Napster after the widespread adoption of the MP3 format, which many are familiar with. Prior to MP3 gaining popularity sharing music digitally was nearly impossible, taking tracks directly from a CD resulted in files up to 100MB, and broadband adoption was still relatively low. But MP3 allowed single songs to be dropped to 3-4MB per file, meaning that transmission of the songs was now possible even at 56K modem speeds. This is because MP3 is a lossy format. The files are so much smaller because the computer program that creates your MP3 files removes pieces of the song that are outside of typical human hearing range (too high or too low for most people to hear). So the song you're listening to as an MP3 isn't the same song as the one on your CD, but it's close enough that you probably can't hear the difference. And, especially if you're listening on an iPod, the headphones you're using are probably of too low a quality for you to be able to hear it anyway.
On the other end of the spectrum is the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format. FLAC, as the acronym implies, is a lossless codec for data compression. So same space is saved over the raw data on a CD, but not by removing parts of the music, which makes the files incredibly large, but very high quality. For example, a CD that you could find in the MP3 format for 50-60MB would be almost 600MB in the FLAC format.
The OiNK site was taken down by a cooperative effort of several law enforcement agencies, as well as the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), an international organization representing the music industry. The goal for shutting down high profile sites is twofold.
One reason, the public face of the operation, is to recoup financial losses done by some site grossly infringing copyrights. This is always a red herring to give legitimacy to the entire operation. The cost of international litigation, not to mention the man-hours that have to go into the effort to coordinate the takedown, as well as the cost for software and tools to track infringing users before the fact is substantial (I don't have any numbers here, but the cost of salaries, software licensing and lawyer's fees must be staggering per operation). Also, if the level of criminal copyright infringement is as high as is claimed when these takedowns occur no single site owner could ever pay the fees.
The second, and real reason behind takedowns, is purely psychological. The goal is to make a spectacle of a site going down so that regular users start to worry about their own participation in a site. If users start to think there's a legitimate possibility that by downloading, or sharing, music online they might be caught and prosecuted then the internal cost-benefit model changes and they might be dissuaded from downloading again in the future.
The real reason filesharing sites are taken down with as much fanfare and publicity as possible (as opposed to just quietly shutting down the largest offenders) is to make consumers fear the repercussions of crossing the recording industry and make regular citizens look at every member of these sites as criminals.
I should be clear: I do not (and would never) advocate the willful, blatant disregard of copyright law. That being said, not every use of filesharing is infringement, and I think it's bad to paint the technology in that way. And it's very clear that the recording industry has refused to see new distribution models for what they are, and are fighting the flow where they should be innovating. What I'd like to see is a business model that fairly compensates artists for their creativity while moving away from the necessity of purchasing discs to do so. iTunes and Napster are good ideas, but are certainly not embraced wholeheartedly.
The post got longer than I originally planned so I decided to split it in two. Tomorrow I'll post about the overall effectiveness of these takedown tactics, as well as some opinions from the artist side of the argument over infringing sites.
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