The Fall of OiNk: How Music File-Sharing is Digging Underground
Music piracy is finally turning its back on the ‘tried and true’ early peer-to- peer (P2P) days of Napster-like clients, spurred on by the increase in both bandwidth by users and interest by law enforcement. To replace this aging model, BitTorrent has stood out above many alternatives as an easy and ‘safe’ way for users to share and trade their collection of tunes. The false sense of safety portrayed by BitTorrent, however, is leading to a legal repeat of the Napster and Direct Connect days. Fool them once, they say.
Aging client-server modeled P2P applications such as Soulseek and Limewire, once heralded for their eclectic and diverse selection of music, are bleeding users and thus bleeding music collections as a consequence of the Napster Effect. In it simplest form, the Napster Effect states that when one file-trading application is taken down in any manner, users of the original applicationstep up to set-up, create, and maintain alternatives to replace the dismantled original. An interesting consequence of the Napster Effect is that these alternatives have the mistakes of the preceding application to build and learn from and thus become more secure and decentralized with each iteration.
As client-server P2P applications took center-stage as the focus of the anti-piracy fight, applications using this model were seized and closed, leaving their users and administrators alike to both develop and look for a safer and faster alternative. BitTorrent has emerged as the clear successor to the Napster model, thriving on the decentralization and (sometimes) anonymity that the protocol provides the users.
Beginning in the early 2000’s, BitTorrent sites (called trackers) began to emerge, most offering an all-in-one source for software, music, movies, and television shows. For many users switching from Napster-like applications, BitTorrent was a fundamental shift in how many users pirated. No longer did you download an application to install and immediately open to search for pirated files. Instead, the BitTorrent application is simply the protocol for sharing, distributed as an application to handle the sharing and downloading of torrents (which will be explained shortly). Once installed, the application sits idly and has no interface or means to search, download, or share files. To actually find files, a user would have to navigate to tracker sites through their browser and download torrent files from the tracker’s website, which would then be opened by the BitTorrent application and begin downloading the requested files.
Early BitTorrent trackers were no more than repository lists of torrents that were recently uploaded or most popular, and provided no commenting or message board system for the users of the tracker. However, all of these trackers were public, meaning that all a user would need to view and download the torrents would be a browser and the web address. And because IP addresses for each person downloading (leeching) and uploading (seeding) were easily accessible through the tracker and torrent file, the anti-piracy fight began to turn to these BitTorrent trackers.As legal threats began to pile up for operators of BitTorrent trackers and certain sites crumbled under the legal pressure, users began to rethink how trackers should be operated and how new trackers could avoid mistakes that early BitTorrent trackers have made. A recurrence of the Napster Effect brought along a new idea to BitTorrent trackers: privacy, which was mastered by Oink’s Pink Palace (commonly referred to as OiNk).
OiNk began in May 2004 as a music-only private BitTorrent tracker and was known for its diverse collection of uploaded music as well as its quirky rules.The first thing a user would notice about OiNk would be the trackers appearance: every page was styled in pink and grey and had the OiNk pig (a pink pig wearing headphones jamming) on every page. Users on OiNk could have avatars, but the tracker had a rule that all avatars must be ‘cute’. No clarification was ever made on what cute signified but users followed it by uploading an avatar that they felt was cute (from cartoon bears to scantily clad women). The tracker built a sense of community with its users by allotting members a message board on the tracker’s site to discuss music piracy and general discussion, as well as providing users the means to comment on any torrent file’s description and thank users for uploading a particular album. OiNk was unique in that it pioneered a strict qualities-standard for every torrent file uploaded to the tracker. For every music torrent, OiNk required that it be a full album being provided for users to download. On top of that, the album must not be a repeat of anything already uploaded in the same format on the tracker, follow specific encoding standards for sound quality, and not be a transcode (a re-encoding of a digital file that usually left the file with significant quality loss). Users on OiNk who downloaded but didn’t upload data to users would be put on warning after a certain threshold and if the user did not upload torrents or upload data, the account would be closed. The qualities standard for users and uploads was unprecedented for a BitTorrent tracker because previously, trackers were not concerned with tracking or monitoring their users behavior. This allowed OiNk to keep the non-contributors limited in what they could download and reward users who frequently contributed by using the invite system, another innovation that OiNk deployed for BitTorrent trackers.
Private trackers are referred to as ‘private’ because users without an account (much like many message boards) cannot view any of the website and instead get a login page or error. Unlike message boards, however, private trackers do not normally allow any kind of registration for users to gain access to the webpage. In OiNk’s situation, a select number of individuals were allowed to sign-up to the tracker before the registration was closed off permanently to provide a base set of users. This base set of users would upload and download torrents and by being a member for a select amount of time or having a positive ratio (your uploaded data on the tracker divided by your downloaded data), would receive an invite code.
Invite codes are what OiNk and other private trackers found was an easy, safe, and efficient way to provide membership to new users and reward current users for contributing to the tracker. Current users would receive an invite code, usually denoted by an alphanumeric code, or a unique registration link that would allow explicitly one member to sign up on the tracker. OiNk was unusually strict in that restrictions would be placed on the inviter’s account (banning, temporary suspension or download limits) if the invitee failed to maintain a respectable ratio.
However, invite codes are eventually what drove OiNk into the ground. From OiNk’s inception, the tracker was known from the outside for being incredibly stringent in handing out invites. Curious BitTorrent users created blogs, forum posts, and even websites for the sole purpose of requesting one of those much-coveted invites. This increase in demand and stagnation in supply lead many OiNk users to sell their invites, which was quickly banned by OiNk’s administrators because of the security risk it posed to their tracker. Their solution to remedy the overwhelming demand for invites, though, was much more dangerous than any risk that could have come from selling invites.
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In the span of two years, OiNk’s administrators see-sawed from handing out invites to extraordinary users who contributed on a daily basis (which kept membership size low) to handing out invites liberally to a majority of its users on a semi-regular basis. Simple math dictates that if users overall obtain an invite on a semi-regular basis and invite new users (who in turn get to distribute their own invites), then the membership size of the tracker will explode. And with OiNk, that is precisely what occurred, as the membership exploded to nearly 180,000 users. The eventual ease to obtaining an invite led legal authorities to simply find a source of invite swaps (such as a chat room or message board), request and obtain an invite, and then monitor the tracker for illegal activity. Just like with Napster, an explosion in memberships (which led to an increase in publicity both online and offline) led to its eventual seizure and closing.
OiNk’s private tracker experiment may have failed as a whole, but users viewing the fall of OiNk from both within the tracker and outside noted its successes. OiNk succeeded in having the first large-scale tracker that enforced standards and rules for every torrent file uploaded, leading to an increase in quality releases and forcing users to find obscure and rare releases to contribute to the tracker. The tracker’s closing revealed that having a sense of community (through requiring ‘cute avatars,’ encouraging discussion on music-related topics, and gratitude between users) on the tracker lead users to be heavily involved with and support the tracker itself. And, in OiNk’s case, the tracker’s closure led to hundreds of angry blog posts and message board discussions regarding the seizure and closure of the tracker as well as the so-called ‘incompetence’ of RIAA. Most importantly, OiNk’s original invite policy showed that invites can be safe and positive to the community if they are given to a small subset of the trackers membership at relatively long intervals.
The Napster Effect focused itself on how post-OiNk private-trackers could remain undetected by legal authorities and yet have a maintainable membership.
From the lessons of OiNk, private trackers discovered that invites and mass numbers of users eventually compromise any protection that being a private tracker provides. Two OiNk spin-offs, both founded and administered by former members themselves, have enacted two new rules: a return to giving out invites to a small subset of the trackers membership at long time intervals, and a maximum user cap (so users can only join when the amount of members is under an arbitrary number, such as 5,000). Both these rules work to both encourage new contributing members to join and push leeching members out to maintain the tracker’s productivity in new content. Some trackers have even gone so far as to justify shutting off invites permanently, arguing that the risk of having someone unwanted invited is higher than the benefit of having increased membership.
The days of new all-in-one or even extensive (such as OiNk) music trackers are over. What has replaced it instead goes against the entire core of the BitTorrent protocol and fundamentally changes how BitTorrent piracy operates.
New trackers are focusing towards specialized private trackers for music, catering to separate genres (indie, electronic, etc.) to separate types (bootlegs, lossless recordings, etc.). In catering to separate genres or types, a single user would have to acquire multiple invites and torrents from multiple trackers simply to get the same amount of pirated material that a single all-in-one site like OiNk would offer. And for novice computer users who seldom pirate, this negatively reinforces the idea of spending so much time acquiring access to a single tracker simply for a subset of music the user wants to pirate. Trackers are in fact shutting out the users that legal enforcement for piracy has been targeting since the inception of RIAA copyright-infringement lawsuits
As this alienation from the average user increases and becomes more commonplace (through the creation of more private selective trackers), users interested in pirating music have two options: returning to public or all-in-one trackers that have been plagued by legal action and are unsecure to the end-user, or simply stop pirating. This natural selection by private trackers essentially leave only the most well-versed computer and BitTorrent savvy internet users who can spend this extraneous amount of time finding invites and obtaining them, as well as browsing multiple trackers for whatever interests them. And as mentioned before, alienating a majority of users and heavily decreasing traffic to the tracker goes counter to everything BitTorrent was established to benefit from.
The future of these trackers is unusually grim, especially for users that have been invited to and joined the trackers. Without a steady, large subset of users browsing, torrent files will decrease in both numbers of available seeds at any time and the time itself that a user will stay connected to the torrent file to seed. The consequence of these actions result in BitTorrent files being culled from the tracker after a period of inactivity and lack of seeds, resulting in less maintained content on the tracker. In this scenario, BitTorrent becomes a liability rather than a tool to facilitate piracy, and the only viable alternatives (FTP, web storage) are essentially backtracks where the history of piracy is concerned. And as history says: what goes around comes around.
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