Britain’s first court case against an illegal file-shared has resulted in the prosecuted individual being cleared of fraud. Alan Ellis was found not guilty at Teesside Crown Court for the charge of conspiracy to defraud. Operating a file-sharing site called Oink, it is the first case to be heard in Britain over copyright breach.
Oink was begun in 2004, run from a flat in Middlesbrough. With a file-sharing premise, the website brought individuals together and allowed for file transactions, with participants asked for donations when joining the site. A police raid in 2007 shut the site down, at which time it had aided the download of approximately 21 million tracks.
Explaining to the court that he had no intention of defrauding copyright holders, Mr Ellis said that the $300,000 found in his Paypal account was to pay for server rental. Using the $18,000 monthly income he suggested that had been intending to buy a server for the website to run on. He added that the reason he had set up the website was “to further my skills, to better my skills for employability.” Gaining the website template from a torrent server, Oink used indexed files on individual’s personal computers to share tracks, rather than hosting individual music files itself. Beginning on a personal computer owned by Mr Ellis, internet traffic drove the site to be hosted on a commercial server in Amsterdam, and it is these rental costs that the donations went towards.
Leaving the court, Mr Ellis declined to speak. However, the outcome of the UK’s first major copyright case regarding illegal file-sharing, speaks volumes, and raises issues for the prosecution in similar cases to come.
