You've probably heard the news that OiNK, one of the largest and most popular online music piracy sites, was raided and shut down today.
Not a lot to say about it (exercising my 5th amendment right or some such), but I thought this post from DJ Rupture, a musician who both admired and feared Oink has an interesting take on the whole thing:
In many cases, I believe that downloading an album from Oink would be both faster (more on this in a bit) and give you more information about the CD than sites like iTunes.
Think about that… a free website, which gives fast downloads of music at equivalent or higher quality than the paid music sites. And this free site has an incredibly deep collection of both new and old releases, usually in a variety of file formats and bit-rates. It’s overwhelming! First thought: wow, Oink is an amazing library. Second thought: wow, I really need to start selling DJ Rupture t-shirts, CD sales will only continue to drop & I gotta make money somehow!
And then this:
For fans, consideration of the music comes before questions of money and ownership - this is how it should be. Any system that doesn’t take that into account as a central fact is going to generate a lot of friction. When I say ’system’, I mean everything from Sony to iTunes to white-label 12″s that cost 8-pounds ($16.38!) in London shops and only have 2 songs on them. (I bought a bunch of these last week, and it hurt).
Oink didn’t offer solutions; it highlighted the problems of over-priced, over-controlled music elsewhere. Oink was an online paradise for music fans. The only people who could truly be mad at it were the ones directly profiting from the sale of digital or physical music. (Like myself! F%5k!)
Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…
About a week after I shipped out orders of the first live CD-r Andy Moor & I did, it appeared on Oink. Someone who had purchased it directly from me turned around and posted it online, for free. I wasn’t mad, I was just more stunned by the reach… and usefulness of the site.
If sharing copywritten music without paying for it were legal, than Oink was the best music website in the world.
I think this gets to the heart of the whole piracy/file sharing conundrum better than a lot of things I've read. Yeah, artists should be able to make money (because if they don't make money, then they can't support themselves, and then they have to get day jobs instead of, you know, making art and then there's no music for us to steal), but we've all sort've entered into this culture-wide collective agreement that we'll do it... not that it's ok, but that we'll do it anyway.
And yeah, that's not right... it's true, it's stealing. But I got to thinking about it: I've spent tons of money on music in the past year whether I may or may not have passed that dollar across a counter directly for music.
I won't buy from iTunes anymore because of the DRM. iTunes won't take the DRM off their music (unless I pay more, which I still think is the most ridiculous thing I can think of) because if they do someone will steal the music. We're no closer to a solution now than we were when Napster first showed up.
But everyone's got to agree that the system's broken and "crackdowns" aren't going to fix anything.
UPDATE: Of course, as soon as I write this, I read that Apple announced today that it will provide DRM-less songs for the same $.99 price as their other downloads. I guess they are trying to move in the right direction, but now the right PR move would be to allow us to trade out our already purchased music from iTunes for the non-DRM files. I would be completely back on board the iTunes train if they did that.
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