Thursday, 25 October 2007

Private BitTorrent OiNK taken down by police

With the BitTorrent world spinning on its heels after the shock takedown of the huge OiNK tracker, there are now indications that the shutdowns may continue. According to the lawyer who lost against ‘DVD Jon’, next stop is Norway and raids are imminent.

Espen

Yesterday, the OiNK BitTorrent tracker was raided and shutdown, not by the MPAA but by real life, bona fide police, working hand in hand with industry association, the IFPI. The war against BitTorrent - usually played out on the civil law arena - has suddenly found itself in the criminal domain. The rules have changed.

With the whole BitTorrent community asking themselves what comes next, a clear indicator has come from a lawyer who works for the industry prosecuting file-sharers:

Norway is next and raids are imminent.

Espen Tøndel is a Norwegian lawyer well known for his legal defeat against ‘DVD Jon‘. He is currently working with the Norwegian branch of the IFPI and MPAA.

Tøndel says the Norwegian police are prepared and ready to carry out raids against Norwegian sites. Everything is in place.

When asked to identify the sites, Tøndel refused to elaborate other than to say that the investigation has been underway for some time and that enough names and evidence has already been gathered to make prosecutions in several cases.

When questioned about the possible fate of Norwegian members of OiNK specifically, nothing further was added other than to stress the close co-operation between British, Dutch and Norwegian police.

Tøndel also speculates on who might be prosecuted if the OiNK database is available to police. His thoughts range from suggesting people who upload and downloaded a lot might be in trouble, right through to ‘random individuals’. Or maybe there is another possibility?

Maybe the police don’t have usable lists.

According to the article, a source has stated that the OiNK membership list was not only encrypted, but also equipped with a ’self-destruct’ type mechanism which relied on a regular signal to continue in ‘OFF’ mode.

Although unconfirmed, this situation would be of some comfort to OiNK’s 180,000 members.

Source

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2 Responses to “Private BitTorrent OiNK taken down by police”

Anonymous said...
26 October 2007 at 21:25

You have to wonder how much the police are bluffing too - the threat of "we have a list of servers, but we wont say who" would obviously give the owners a long enough time to flee the country if they were facing severe enough penalties.

It is more likely that the scare tactic is being used to get owners to shutdown their servers without any actual evidence.


CyberSt0rm said...
29 October 2007 at 10:07

Here's the thing, you can shut a few BitTorrent sites here and there, but you can't shut them all down!

And for every one that closes, another one takes it place!!

Also, I'd like to see them try to shut down private BT trackers in countries like Iran, China and Russia!!


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