I received news earlier this morning that my favorite MP3 torrent site, Oink.cd, was being shut down. At first, I couldn’t believe it since I’ve always thought of torrent sites as untouchable due to the fact that no real data is stored on the servers. However, a quick visit revealed that it was indeed shut down and the a whole bunch of government and police agencies were looking into the site’s activities.
It’s a sad day, really because Oink was pretty much one of the only ways to find hard to get mixes and rare tunes but I guess the thing the RIAA was concerned with is that users of Oink were responsible for leaking at least 50 albums ahead of schedule over the last year or so.
This comes less than a month after Canadians were barred from using Demonoid.com, another popular, invite-only torrent site. This came after Demonoid received a letter from the CRIA threatening illegal action.
For many of us who grew up with the internet, it’s become common to see file sharing sites and apps get shut down since the days of Scour.net, Audiogalaxy, Napster, WinMX, etc. but it seemed that Bittorrent was somehow different. However, it looks like it may be the beginning of the end of another file sharing cycle. Who knows what might come up next?
I’ve always been of the thinking that file sharing is a positive and I’ve always purchased music I like after I’ve listened to it but I guess there are simply too many folks that are just downloading music without supporting the artist (and in turn, the greedy music industry). Personally, I’d like to see more musicians go the route of Radiohead with their In Rainbows album, where fans can pay as much or as little as they want. I haven’t seen the numbers but the response on the net is quite positive.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
private ftp networks have always been and will always be the best download source
one of the networks have been up and running for 10 years now, that’s just impressive.
“Personally, I’d like to see more musicians go the route of Radiohead with their In Rainbows album, where fans can pay as much or as little as they want. ”
and if everything goes the way of Rainbows, then music will get exponentially better!
That sucks. Though I don’ use this site, it seems like this might mean the end to a lot of torrent sites.
{ 2 trackbacks }