Squeals of OiNK lovers reverberate across the Internet

[Above: the somewhat less-than-tasteful banner for OinkMemorial.Blogspot.com]

When people lose a close friend, they sometimes act strangely in their grief. When that close friend is an illegal online community of music pirates, things get stranger still. The demise of OiNK (which seriously only happened yesterday) has already become a sort of Lennonesque event for the website's primary beneficiaries - the hardest of hardcore (stolen) music junkies.

So, how to mourn? Well, let's go through the familiar continuum, starting with denial - in the sense of denying false charges. A lot of the media buzz going around the Internet yesterday painted OiNK as a "subscription-based" service. Not so, points out Releaselog:

"Where did they get that from?" writes poster Shiny. "OiNK members never had to pay anything to join, upload, download, use the forums, upgrade their status or to do anything in fact. Although you could donate to the site, you were not forced to donate only encouraged to keep the site running."

A more official-sounding source (the U.K.'s Guardian) backs Shiny up on that, and also raises the question of just how much of OiNK's file base was pre-release material. In the infinite Internet echo chamber, questions like these go a long way toward helping readers approach the truth. It should also be noted that the 24-year-old admin whom police busted yesterday was released on bail without charge this morning - pending further investigation, of course.

Next, we move on to anger. As you might expect, P2Pnet is rather pissed about this series of unfortunate events. Included in the site's recap of the events: a statement from the "Dutch and British Pirate parties." Man, parliamentary systems seem to create some wacky political factions, don't they?

The Daily Swarm also points us to a phone interview with the annoyed CEO of OiNK's Danish server hosting company. Apparently his organization lost 30,000 Euros worth of equipment in yesterday's OiNK-related police raid.

Now we come to fear. The Idolator blog did some fine legwork on the legal ramifications for ex-OiNKers, and the initial prognosis is pretty scary:

"They should be very, very scared," says an unnamed "American intellectual property litigator" who spoke with the blog. "There are at least two reasons why this is not just your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill file sharing copyright infringement: this involves music that has not yet been commercially released, and money changed hands."

Idolator has really been covering the hell out of the OiNK fallout, so check out some of its other features on the bust.

And, courtesy of Idolator, we come to the final stop on the Grief Express: acceptance. Various memorials to the dearly departed torrent site have popped up across the Web, including a blog, message board, and a touching video. Sigh... the Net just won't be the same again, will it? At least not until the next exclusive file-sharing organization steps up and takes OiNK's place.

Related links:
Idolator: OiNK reaction roundup, day two
Internet Business Law Services: OiNK financial analysis
OiNK.cd (good luck getting in!)

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