Hosted in Sweden, the Pirate Bay quickly became the world’s leading index of pirated material. Movies, music, TV shows, cracked software—it was all available, not in any one place but shared among thousands, with the Pirate Bay servers hosting only the governing torrent files. The site’s early popularity came from its no-apologies approach: its founders believed what they were doing should be legal, but if it wasn’t they were going to do it anyway. If running a torrent tracker violated copyright law, then the Pirate Bay founders were willing to break that law.
This dissident viewpoint drew attention, and attracted users from the same disaffected subculture of Internet trolls that would later populate such luminary organizations as Anonymous and 4chan. The Pirate Bay’s founders loved controversy—one of them, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, had previously hosted a site called “America’s Dumbest Soldiers,” which provided casualty reports from the Iraq War and let users vote on the presumed stupidity of the death. They trumpeted their actions as civil disobedience, and publicly flipped the bird to those who didn’t like it. In 2004, lawyers for DreamWorks SKG sent the site a cease-and-desist letter, threatening legal action under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, concerning a torrent for a pirated copy of Shrek 2. The response Svartholm Warg drafted was characteristic:
As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, U.S. law does not apply here . . . It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
Not every site was so combative. The Pirate Bay was open to the public and hosted a wide variety of file types, and its founders adored attention. Most of the torrent trackers were private, invitation-only affairs, limited to one or two types of media and dedicated to secrecy. As the Pirate Bay went wide, covering all types of files, the private trackers went deep, building completist collections segregated by genre and medium. Over the next few years, several of these private trackers would flourish beyond their founders’ imaginings, snowballing into large-scale indices of pirated material whose archival breadth surpassed not just the Pirate Bay’s but also the Scene’s and, in some cases, even the Smithsonian’s. The best of these, which grew from the humblest of origins, was the legendary music tracker known as Oink’s Pink Palace.
Oink himself was Alan Ellis, a 21-year-old computer science student from the United Kingdom. Born in Leeds and raised in Manchester, Ellis had enrolled in 2002 in a computer science program at the University of Teesside, located in the decaying industrial city of Middlesbrough in the UK’s blighted northeast. Ellis was shy, intensely private, and—in sharp contrast to the Pirate Bay’s founders—unfailingly polite. He stood only 5'5", but he was an avid squash player and kept his body in peak physical condition. His hair and eyes were dark, and his square, handsome face was bisected by a pronounced dimple in his chin.
Ellis found his university education lacking. The school’s curriculum seemed geared to an early era of computing. Courses were, in the best British academic tradition, conducted in languages like Fortran and Lisp that had been dead for centuries—the programming equivalents of ancient Greek and Latin. There was no focus on commerce or contemporary computer trends, and there was a baffling lack of interest in the Internet. In conversations with potential employers, Ellis kept hearing of demand for newer programming languages like PHP, for Web scripting, or SQL, for database administration, but the school offered courses in neither.
So he decided to teach himself. In his spare time between classes and squash, Ellis downloaded a few open-source software packages and familiarized himself with the basics of both languages. Although he wasn’t expecting to make any money, his idea was to learn employable skills by running a website that functioned almost like a business, serving dynamic requests to a variety of users. A torrent tracker was perfect in this regard: it used an SQL database to sort the torrents, and PHP to present them to users.
On May 30, 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace went live. The site was served from Ellis’ home PC, in an off-campus house he shared with five other people. Ellis announced the launch of the tracker by posting to the forums on other torrent sites and inviting in a few trusted confidants. There wasn’t much interest. In the wake of the Pirate Bay’s popularity, hundreds of other private trackers were opening. Most would stick around for a few months, maybe a year, then sputter out of existence. Ellis expected the same future for Oink, although this didn’t trouble him—he viewed the site as a hobby. Nor was he expecting any legal trouble. When he registered for the domain name “Oink .me.uk,” Ellis paid with his own credit card and used his real name.
In its first few weeks Oink’s Pink Palace attracted just a few hundred users. The site was so quiet that Ellis occasionally shut down the Web server software on his PC to play computer games. But then a niche opened in the tracker ecosystem. Avoiding the headache of the public download networks like LimeWire, for some time Ellis had been sourcing music from another private site, Raiden.se, which was, like the Pirate Bay, hosted in Sweden. But in the summer of 2004 Raiden had mysteriously folded after technical difficulties, and its entire database of torrents had been lost. Without the site, the music files themselves, hosted on laptops and personal computers around the globe, were disorganized and inaccessible. In twentieth-century terms, it was like walking into a library and burning down the card catalog.
Ellis saw an opportunity. Returning to the torrent forums, he announced that Oink was rebranding and would no longer host movie or software files. Instead, it would be an exclusive music tracker, long on quality and short on quantity. Unlike the Pirate Bay, which acted mostly as a link repository, with limited oversight or quality control, Oink would be something else entirely: a carefully curated digital archive with a fanatical emphasis on high-fidelity encodings.
He began an aggressive branding campaign. He ran a contest to determine the site’s mascot. The winner was a plump piglet wearing a pair of headphones, christened Oink. The branding campaign put a friendly face on the tracker’s increasingly demanding technical requirements. Ellis was becoming a quality snob. He permitted only mp3s ripped from the original compact discs, and emphasized archival completion. The site’s rules for uploads rivaled the Scene’s in their complexity. And there were further rules—rules governing how music was to be tagged and cataloged, rules regarding how torrents were to be uploaded, rules regarding album art and liner notes, rules regarding behavior in the site’s moderated forums. There were even rules outlining how “cute” members’ avatars had to be, the precedent set by the hard-rocking piglet himself.
Being a member of Oink was demanding. The private nature of the site meant users had to give email addresses, have persistent logins, and reveal their IP addresses. They also had to maintain a minimum ratio of material uploaded to downloaded. That is, a user had to give music to get music. The easiest way to do that was to upload a new album, one that was not already on the site. And the easiest way to do that was to get your hands on an original copy on CD and encode it to an mp3.