Last week, Interpol shut down an online file-sharing community called OiNK’s Pink Palace in conjunction with international representatives of the recording industry. Users navigating to the site’s homepage found a message from recording industry representatives informing them that “a criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users.” Not long afterwards, accounts of the shutdown began to crop up on major news wires, detailing an elaborate raid on the founder’s home in Britain and the site’s servers in Amsterdam.
While the authorities involved were quite forthcoming with information regarding the motivation of their investigation and the importance of their accomplishment, disgruntled ex-members of OiNK were quick to fire back at several alleged inaccuracies in their statements. Reuters described the site as a place where members paid mandatory fees in exchange for continued access to a massive library of audio content. Former users retorted that access to the members-only service was driven purely by strictly enforced rules regarding share ratios and music file quality. According to users, the only exchange of currency took the form of voluntary donations to the site’s administrators, intended to offset the significant expenses of day-to-day operations.
Whether the intent of Interpol and Reuters’s exaggerations and fallacies was malicious or simply the result of a lack of technical know-how remains unknown. Either way, some onlookers have seized upon an opportunity to scrutinize the motives and methods of both sides in the ongoing battle around music downloading to a deeper degree than ever before. Markus Giesler, an assistant professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, has made a thorough study of the file-sharing conflict — his marketplace drama theory likens the struggle between producers and consumers to interactions between antagonistic characters in stage plays.
“What we’re seeing with OiNK is a kind of crisis ritual, which is something frequently seen in political or cultural conflicts in general,” explains the enthusiastic Giesler. “When you have some form of disagreement among people, one party will pick a member of the other side and publicly execute that member, not so much to shut down that particular framework or service, but to show in ritual form that this is what’s going to happen to all of us if we don’t comply. It’s more about changing the expectations of the people and creating anxieties so that they will eventually change their behaviour (and) return to more official forms of music consumption.”
In other words, a compelling case can be made that the industry’s motivation for attacking sites like OiNK is more of a scare tactic than an attempt to recuperate lost revenues. Within hours of the raid, the site’s founder was released on bail. A few days later, the www.oink.cd domain was reclaimed by the file-sharing movement — currently, it points to domain name servers registered to the Pirate’s Bay, the self-described “world’s largest bittorrent tracker” (essentially an indirect source of downloadable files). And within the next few days, file sharers can expect well-publicized launches for at least two sites tailor-made to fit the niche OiNK occupied so comfortably.
“On a technological level, I don’t think the OiNK shutdown will be effective,” says Giesler. “There are millions of other solutions out there, and people will just migrate. But many people who read about this will find it pretty intimidating and probably change their behaviour. In that respect, what we see is an effective performance. It’s a way of showing to the market audience that this is not a tolerated form of music consumption; therefore, this kind of shutdown is employed as a symbolic act of ideological warfare.”
So the copyright battle rages on. In the wake of the shutdown, online enclaves of OiNK refugees have invoked the metaphor of the mythological hydra — when one of many heads is rent from the body, another will grow to replace it. At the end of the day, despite the draconian measures of one faction and the folkloric persistence of the other, one question remains conspicuously difficult to answer: Which side is in the right?
“I find it hard to make a normative statement to the extent that file sharing is good and the industry is evil,” muses Giesler, indicating that the posed question may never be wholly answered. “What’s good is the fact that we renegotiate the terms, and as long as we do that, there’s evolution. We move into the next drama, and that’s how we structure our culture through markets.”
