Oink's Pink Palace

Oink's Pink Palace

Oink.cd frontpage (logged in) on 18 October 2007
Type of site	Private BitTorrent tracker
Owner	Alan Ellis (aka Oink)
Created by	Oink (Modified TBSource)
Revenue	Voluntary donations
Slogan(s)	Because 'moo' just doesn't sound right.
Website	OiNK.cd or OiNK.me.uk
Registration	Free, Invitation only
Launched	30 May 2004
Current status	Tracker forcibly shut down

Oink's Pink Palace (frequently stylized as OiNK) was a prominent BitTorrent tracker which operated from 2004 to 2007. Following a two-year investigation by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the site was shut down on 23 October 2007, by British and Dutch police agencies. These music industry organisations described OiNK as an "online pirate pre-release music club", whereas former users described it as one of the world's largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories. About a month before the shut-down, music magazine Blender elected OiNK's creator, British software engineer Alan Ellis, to their The Powergeek 25 — the Most Influential People in Online Music list. Alan Ellis was tried for conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown court, the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing, and found not guilty on 15 January 2010.

OiNK was an invitation-only community, with about 180,000 members. When closed by the authorities, the site had stored about 200,000 torrent files. One of OiNK's rules was that users could not pay to gain membership to the site, but had an opportunity to donate money to the site. Members were required to maintain minimum upload-to-download ratios, and to have cute avatars.

OiNK placed an emphasis on the sharing of torrents for high-quality MP3 and lossless audio formats such as FLAC, along with other formats such as Ogg Vorbis and M4A. The torrents for E-books, computer software, and e-learning videos were also routinely shared amongst OiNK's users.