What may have been one of the largest collections of amazing music and programs in bittorrent format was raided last night and shut down.  Mega torrent tracker OiNK, which had a near fight club attitude to advertising and was available to users only on an invite basis, seems to have been shut down for good.  Excerpts from the IFPI press release,

British and Dutch police today shut down the world’s biggest source of illegal pre-release chart albums and arrested a 24-year old man in an operation coordinated between Middlesbrough and Amsterdam.

The site, with an estimated membership of 180,000, has been used by many hardcore file-sharers to violate the rights of artists and producers by obtaining copyrighted recordings and making them available on the internet.

The site’s servers, based in Amsterdam, were seized in a series of raids last week. OiNK’s operator allegedly made money by setting up a donations account on the site facilitated by PayPal.

Reuters has a quote from one of the people who works for IFPI,

“OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online,” said Jeremy Banks, head of the anti-piracy unit at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which helped in the investigation.

I am saddened to see OiNK go, if it truly is gone forever.  Over the last two years or so I was introduced to countless amounts of new music that I otherwise may have never heard before.  In my opinion, the music industry needs to figure out a better way to distribute music, with CD sales falling every year; one would think they get the drift.  My opinion is that the $1 per song download through iTunes and similar sites is not the answer either.

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