This is odd, to my thinking. The founder and owner of the UK file sharing peer to peer site Oink (great name) has been acquitted of conspiracy to defraud. In spite of earning $18,000 per month from people downloading from the site because people would send donations in order to keep it going, the owner - one Alan Ellis - assured the court he had no intention to defraud copyright holders. He was creating a music sharing community, is all.
Maybe when he started in 2004 he had the impression that only people who owned the rights to the music they were posting would use the system. I suppose, in an environment in which people must be acquitted when there is any reasonable doubt about their guilt, proving that he intended anything other than what he says would be difficult.
It seems an odd one, though. Comparing the result to the Napster shutdown early in the last decade and you have to wonder what the exact difference is.
Either way, although it's unlikely Oink will be back anytime soon, its owner is guilty of precisely nothing.
