Following in the wake of TV Links case last week - which Jack wrote about eloquently on this blog - yesterday's news of police raids on Oink was another blow for filesharers.
But, is everything that's being reported about Oink accurate? Certainly the details seem far less clear today than they did yesterday: for a start, the 24-year-old man arrested in Middlesbrough has been released, so far without charge.
As I tried to reflect in our report, not everything that has been parroted by the media in relation to the case seems entirely correct: for example, the implication that Oink was a subscription service is not true. It was private and, like many other sites, accepted donations from users, but - as most web entrepreneurs will tell you - that hardly ever covers your true costs.
Nor is the idea that it was primarily used to share pre-release music entirely accurate. Oink users have been in touch to say that there was a proportion of pre-release music around (which, by definition, must often come from people inside the recording industry) but that it was not the primary aim of those sharing on Oink.
Where Oink was different to some services was that it required you to upload a certain ratio of material in order to be able to download. This is great news for the UK record industry, which has been more aggressive towards uploaders of music than those who simply leech. But otherwise, the status of tracker websites seems untested in the courts.
A spokesman for the IFPI told me yesterday that Oink was "obviously a standard infringement of UK copyright law" - but it strikes me that the law here is far from obvious; not least because few, if any, filesharing cases ever make it through the legal process.
Were you an Oink user? What do you think?
