Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.

“21 million downloads. 600,000-plus albums. £300,000. This was a cash cow, it was perfectly designed to profit him and it was as dishonest as the day is long,” said Makepeace.

It is common sense to come to the conclusion that Oink was dishonest, claimed the prosecution lawyer, adding that Ellis knows that it’s dishonest “to promote, encourage and facilitate criminal activity,” and accusing him of telling the jury “persistent, cunning, calculated lies.”

It would, of course, be dishonest to promote “criminal activity”, but Mr Makepeace should be very well aware that the activity engaged in by OiNK’s users is covered under civil law.

Switching momentarily from criticism to praise and then back again, Makepeace said that the OiNK website was a “wonderful machine” for sharing music but noted that while the site had a really good brand name, it was a brand synonymous with “ripping off music.”

University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales. Mr Makepeace trashed her evidence.

“It’s nonsense, it’s flannel, it’s verbiage, it’s garbage,” he told the Court.

For the defense, Alex Stein said that Ellis had never knowingly acted dishonestly and that in 2004 when OiNK was launched, it was a “brave new world” on the Internet.

“In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.

The media organization being referred to by Stein was the IFPI, who he said had never requested that OiNK be shut down, and had instead “sat and watched.”

Gazette Live reports that Stein went on to launch a scathing attack on the IFPI.

“They used this site. Their own members used this site to promote their own music and now they’re crushing him. Maybe he grew too big for them, maybe they’ve taken a different marketing approach. I don’t know. But it was decided that this site should be taken down.

“All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody’s acting dishonestly it’s them,” he said.

At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.

The verdict cannot be appealed and Ellis can finally put the past behind him and move on.

Breaking story…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Yesterday Ellis stated that he had initially hosted the tracker in his bedroom while studying at Teesside University, and used the coding experience to develop his skills in order to bring future employment possibilities.

Today more details became available, which appear to show that Ellis believed that he operated his site within the law.

While it’s impossible to say what goes on inside another person’s head, when it comes to the law the average BitTorrent site admin or keen BitTorrent user will be mostly tuned into the requirements of copyright and violations of copyright law. In basic terms relating to this case, the unauthorized copying and/or distribution of copyright works, both illegal under UK copyright law.

BitTorrent trackers such as OiNK do not distribute, store or duplicate copyright works, so when Ellis said yesterday that he viewed what he did as similar to how the post office or telephone company operates, i.e directing other people’s data (illegal or not), he clearly believes that type of operation is permissible under copyright law. Indeed, unlike in other jurisdictions, there is no offense of ‘facilitation’ under UK copyright law.

“I didn’t think the site was abusing the copyrights,” he said, and in the above context he was right. But if OiNK wasn’t abusing copyrights, that responsibility must fall elsewhere – at the feet of the site’s members.

“If these people chose to download music and in doing so were breaking the law, then that was their responsibility, not mine,” Ellis told the Court. “I never saw that I was responsible for them downloading music.”

While Ellis can’t be held responsible for what others do on his site, he was candid when it came to admitting that he made use of some of the material indexed by the tracker. Ellis told the Court that he spent a lot of money buying music, but had used file-sharing as a mechanism to discover new artists.

“From my experience if I download music and I like it, I would go out and buy it. I understood most people to have that view,” he explained.

According to Gazette Live, Ellis also told the Court that he responded “out of good will” to takedown requests received from the infamous Web Sheriff anti-piracy company on behalf of rights holders.

So, if OiNK didn’t break copyright law by not transferring, copying or storing copyright works, and there is no offense of facilitation of the same under UK law, why was the site shut down and why is this trial taking place?

Maybe because the BPI and IFPI knew that copyright infringement charges wouldn’t stick, they instead guided the police down another route, that of Conspiracy to Defraud.

Ellis denies that charge and the case continues.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

From the very beginning, the music industry has pictured the site’s founder as someone who charges users for access to the site, claiming that it was set up to make profits from infringing on the rights of the major record labels.

Its users were criminals who conspired to steal from the music industry for reasons other than the enjoyment of music, music industry groups claimed. “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure,” Jeremy Banks of the IFPI said shortly after the site fell, insinuating that profits were made behind the scenes.

Last week the prosecution in the OiNK trial continued down the same path, pointing out that Ellis had gathered nearly $300,000 from voluntary donations over the years. They made it seem like Ellis was running a profitable business but failed to mention that a large chunk of this money was continuously invested back into the site and its running costs.

No proof was provided that Ellis used any of the donation money to enrich himself. He had the equivalent of $32,500 in several savings accounts at the time of his arrest. Ellis planned to use this money to buy servers for the tracker.

This week Ellis has the chance to start telling the Court his side of the story, and has been detailing how he initially hosted the tracker in his own bedroom when he was studying at Teesside University.

Ellis explained how OiNK began as a pet project with the sole purpose of improving his “outdated” UK honours degree in software engineering. “I didn’t have an intention, I was furthering my skills as a programmer, as a software engineer,” Ellis told Teesside Crown Court today.

Ellis, who was working on the backend of the site to make sure that everything kept running, was merely providing a platform for OiNK’s users to share whatever they wanted. He denied the charges of conspiracy to defraud the music industry.

The case continues.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The private site tracked hundreds and thousands of torrents linking to the finest recordings from virtually every musical genre. With millions of peers, it was more popular than many public trackers.

The site was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement in October 2007, based on intel provided by two music industry lobby organizations, the IFPI and the BPI. The police arrested Alan Ellis, the founder of the site, and months later several uploaders were arrested as well.

Four of the uploaders pleaded guilty at Teesside Crown Court in December 2008, where they were all charged with copyright infringement offenses. The four were later sentenced to community service and fines.

The trial of OiNK founder Alan Ellis was pushed back and started today at Middlesbrough Crown Court. Due to a press boycott of the previous court hearings, there was no information available on the reasons for the delay.

What we do know is that Ellis has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the music industry for his role in the OiNK tracker.

During the first day of his trial little has happened. The case has been adjourned until tomorrow when the jury will be assigned. There is still a reporting ban in place on three specific issues, but the trial can and will be reported on.

We will cover the rest of the trial, which is expected to end next week, in the coming days.

Update: Court documents list the remaining uploader as part of the trial, but new information received by TorrentFreak says that his case is due later this year.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.