by SHANE SINNOTT

On Tuesday, Oct. 23, the incredibly good music torrent site OiNK was taken down by a team of U.K. and Dutch police, and music industry groups. The Web site was a private, invite-only one, and members had to adhere to ratio requirements (meaning how much you take can’t be too out of whack with how much you give) that resulted in a wealth of fast, well-seeded torrents.

It was run by a group of tight-assed bureaucrats whose strict rules on quality and content resulted in the most glorious music source to come out of the Internet so far—a search on OiNK almost never came up empty. Needless to say, its absence is completely fucking with my, and a lot of other people’s, shit. By Internet standards, OiNK’s membership was small, around 180,000 by most accounts, but as the saying goes, every one of them had a blog. Within hours of its closing down, the blogosphere (yuck) was abuzz, and there is already both an over-the-top memorial site (oinkmemorial.blogspot.com) and a memorial forum (tinyurl.com/22cxl4).

The day after the takedown, a press release was even circulated by Markus Giesler, a teacher at York University’s Schulich School of Business, who offered this “insight”: “The shutdown of OiNK is an example of how the music industry creates a false drama—shutting down one platform with great publicity, with no significant or widespread legal ramifications—to show to the public what will happen if they don’t comply. This creates expectations and anxieties and therefore changes the behaviour of people. It’s a form of ideological warfare.”

To me, the shutdown is the latest in a series of music industry gaffes. Someone over there should have realized that the OiNK membership base is the most valuable target audience in the market, full of music broadcasters, writers and passionate fans. For fuck’s sake, why not just let us do it? Let us trade away unencumbered, and in return you can have our names, our interests and our online habits—that’s how Facebook, Google and everybody else does it. The days of record sales contributing significantly to profits are dwindling fast, and no amount of Web site shutdowns will change that.