A Dark Day For Music

Hello everyone, this is my first post on the site. I feel welcomed already.

I come along with a load of bad news. Like at least 50,000 other people, I woke up Tuesday morning to find a gaping hole in the internet that was not goatse.cx. OiNK DOT CD (formerly OiNK DOT Me DOT UK) had been raided, taken down, and replaced by an advertisement for two fascist organizations. I was a member of OiNK for over a year, and a fairly prominent forum user for the last six months. The matter was widely mis-reported by the mainstream media, and it’s a good thing that they spent their time and money getting the facts wrong on OiNK, because San Diego wasn’t on fire or anything.

This is a major blow for the file-sharing community, especially the section devoted to music. I could go on and on about what is wrong with OiNK’s shutdown, but it’s been discussed to death in the past few days. I will say this, though: I wish more than the best to Alan, the former administrator of the site, as well as to the other other admin and the rest of the staff. I also hope that the user-base turns out okay, as I suspect they will. As The PirateBay’s brokep said in his response to the shutdown, the answer to this problem lies not in a single site, but in many sites to ease the burden and the feeling of emptiness should take-down attacks be successful in the future.

So where does this leave OurTunes? Well, it means that the need for a new means of sharing music is just that much more needed in our society. Apple has a responsibility and an obligation to stop filesharers from abusing the network system. We can see this in the release of iTunes 7. We as the users, have an obligation to get around their efforts. With the loss of OiNK, OurTunes is all the more important to music fans. We no longer have a nearly-complete database of artists’ catalogs to browse at our leisure, but we at least have each other’s iTunes libraries. And that’s a start.