Oink's Pink Palace

Raided by Interpol, and its founder walked free

Shut down
19902026

OiNK was an invitation-only BitTorrent tracker with about 180,000 members and a reputation for the highest audio quality standards anywhere. In October 2007, after a two-year investigation, British and Dutch police shut it down and arrested its founder. Alan Ellis became the first person in Britain prosecuted for file sharing, and in January 2010 a jury found him not guilty.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2004
  2. 2004 Launch
    OiNK opens

    An invitation-only tracker built around audio quality.

  3. 2007
  4. September 2007 Peak
    Ellis named one of the 25 most influential people in online music

    Blender magazine puts the site's creator on its Powergeek list, a month before the raid.

  5. 23 October 2007 Shutdown
    Operation Ark Royal

    British and Dutch police close the site and arrest Alan Ellis. The servers are seized in the Netherlands.

  6. 24 October 2007 Decline
    What.CD is founded the same day

    The community reassembles somewhere else within hours.

  7. 2010
  8. 15 January 2010 Legal
    Alan Ellis is found not guilty

    A jury clears him of conspiracy to defraud. OiNK had hosted no music, only torrents.

The site through time

Browse oink.cd as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2004 2005 2006 2007 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Alan Ellis 2004–2007 Founded Software engineer, tried and acquitted at Teesside Crown Court

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 180,000 October 2007 Reported Approximate membership when the site was seized

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Closed on 23 October 2007 by British and Dutch police in Operation Ark Royal, a joint action with Interpol, the IFPI and the BPI, following a two-year investigation. Founder Alan Ellis was arrested and the Dutch police seized the servers.

Our analysis: The prosecution failed on exactly the point the site had been built around. OiNK hosted no music, only torrent files pointing at it, and a jury accepted that this was not conspiracy to defraud. The site was destroyed anyway, which was the actual objective.

History [edit]

Invitation only

Alan Ellis, a software engineer from Middlesbrough, ran OiNK from 2004. Membership could not be bought, only earned or gifted, though members could donate. Everyone had to maintain an upload-to-download ratio. There was a rule about having a cute avatar.

Underneath the whimsy it was rigorous. OiNK specialised in high quality and lossless audio, FLAC alongside high-bitrate MP3, and its members treated a badly encoded upload as a personal failing. The industry called it an "online pirate pre-release music club". Its users called it the best organised music library in the world, and a month before the raid the magazine Blender put Ellis on its list of the 25 most influential people in online music.

At the end it had roughly 180,000 members and about 200,000 torrent files.

Operation Ark Royal

On 23 October 2007, after a two-year investigation by the IFPI and the BPI, British and Dutch police moved together. Ellis was arrested in Britain. Dutch police seized the servers at the hosting company NForce. The site went dark immediately.

The member email addresses stored on those servers had not been encrypted, so they went to the authorities along with everything else.

Not guilty

Ellis was tried at Teesside Crown Court for conspiracy to defraud, the first person in the United Kingdom prosecuted over file sharing. On 15 January 2010 the jury found him not guilty. OiNK had hosted no music. It had hosted pointers to music, and the prosecution could not turn that into fraud.

The verdict came more than two years after the site was destroyed, which tells you what the raid was actually for. What.CD was founded on the day OiNK closed, by its refugees, and lasted another nine years before the same thing happened to it in France.

Similar projects

Megaupload The file locker the FBI took down 2005–2012 Napster Every song in the world, free, right now 1999–2001 Kazaa The post-Napster free-for-all 2001–2012 LimeWire Half your MP3s, half your malware 2000–2010 Morpheus Cut off its own network overnight, and kept going anyway 2001–2008 BearShare Paid the RIAA $30 million, then became someone else 2000–2006

Sources [edit]

  1. 18 Years Ago Today, One of the Internet's Most Influential Music Communities Disappeared Four/Four Magazine 23 October 2025 [archived]
  2. OiNK coverage NME 23 October 2007 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).