For the end user, though, the donations were a small part of the story. Most were concerned with maintaining their upload/download ratios, and they were running out of material to source. That left one option: a blazingly fast Internet connection. The dormroom downloaders got this on their parents’ dime, but for everyone else it cost real money. This meant either paying for more home bandwidth or renting a “seedbox” server from a hosting company at twenty bucks a month, which thousands of Oinkers did.
Why were people paying to use Oink? The torrent technology wasn’t easy to master, a good ratio was difficult to maintain, the forum moderators were Nazis, and uploading even a single byte of data to the site technically constituted a felony-level conspiracy. A lot of the stuff on Oink was also available from the Pirate Bay and Kazaa, and, past a certain point, it would be easier just to pay for iTunes, right? Theories abounded. The classical economist saw the benefits of unlimited consumer choice outweighing the cost of ratio maintenance and the risk of getting caught. The behavioral economist saw a user base accustomed to consuming music for free and now habitually disinclined to pay for it. The political theorist saw a base of active dissidents fighting against the “second enclosure of the commons,” attempting to preserve the Internet from corporate control. The sociologist saw group-joiners, people for whom the exclusivity of Oink was precisely its appeal.
The best answers to the question, though, were culled from the site itself. Oink’s heavily trafficked user forums revealed a community that resembled Ellis himself: technically literate middle-class twentysomethings, mostly male, enrolled in university or employed in entry-level jobs. A significant number of members weren’t even that lucky, but were instead what the British government called “NEETs”: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Concerts were a popular topic of discussion; so were drugs. One of the busiest threads on the site simply asked “Why Do You Pirate Music?” Thousands of different answers came in. Oinkers talked of cost, contempt for major labels, the birth of a new kind of community, courageous political activism, and sometimes simply greed. Another thread—a better one, really—asked users to post pictures of themselves. If the webcam selfies revealed anything about the average music pirate, it was an unusual fondness for septum piercings. But the biggest draw of all was the mere existence of such forums. They were a place to learn about emerging technology, about new bands, about underground shows, and even about the way the music business really functioned. iTunes was just a store, basically a mall—Oink was a community.
Ellis consciously cultivated this ethos. Most private trackers failed. The site operators were standoffish and uncommunicative, and as a result the members didn’t upload enough material. Ellis, by contrast, mandated civility of discourse, even as he urged his members to develop ever greater levels of both musical snobbery and technical skill. He seemed at times to promote an almost utopian vision, except his utopia actually worked. The result was illegal, of course, but it was also something of great value, produced cooperatively, and built in naked opposition to the expectations of in-kind reward that supposedly governed human behavior in the capitalist age.
Ellis’ life during this period took on simple, almost monastic dimensions. He lived in a shared apartment in a shit town in the middle of nowhere, commuted in the morning to a hump job no one cared about, then returned each day as the venerable abbot of the online world. On file-sharing forums across the Internet, Oink invites became a scarce commodity, and were sometimes even traded for money. (Ellis discouraged this.) On those forums too, the anonymous pirate captain Oink was feted and praised.
A less friendly sort of attention came from rights-holders. By 2007, the site’s inbox was overflowing with takedown emails, and the pretense of polite dialogue had been dropped in favor of threatening legalese. M.I.A., the Go! Team, and Prince all succeeded in having their record catalogs pulled from the site. Other, less familiar players did too. “The TUBE BAR prank calls are not public domain and are copyrighted by Bum Bar Bastards LLC and exclusively distributed by T.A. Productions,” read a memorable notice. “We demand that you cease its unauthorised distribution of our copyrighted content.”
Ellis began to worry about his exposure. Oink had gotten too big, too quickly. There were too many users and too little new material for them to source. The most common complaint from the newly invited was that “there was nothing left to upload.” The best way to maintain your ratio on Oink was to find something totally new, and as the site expanded, the best way to do that was to infiltrate the recording industry’s supply chain any way you could. Leaked material started to appear on Oink, sometimes weeks early. Often these were Glover’s own leaks, but sometimes Oink’s user base, driven by the relentless economy of download ratios, started scooping even RNS.
Ellis was not a member of the Scene, and he was not interested in infiltrating the record companies’ supply chains. He was an archivist, not a leaker, and he knew that the prerelease game brought attention he didn’t need. Seeking to mitigate the problem, he began to consider opening other media verticals that would allow his new users to meaningfully contribute without leaking. Television and movies were out, as other private trackers were already operating in those spaces, and there was an unwritten consensus between site operators not to tread on one another’s turf. He decided, finally, that he would permit the uploading of audiobooks.
For a site that had already pirated the vast majority of recorded music in history, it sounded like an inconsequential decision, but Ellis had just tampered with one of the primal forces of nature. J. K. Rowling was by this time well on her way to becoming the wealthiest author in the history of ink. Her seven-book Harry Potter saga had broken all known sales records and been translated into 67 languages, including West Frisian and ancient Greek. An eight-picture movie deal with Warner Brothers had turned young stars Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe into household names. The literary franchise comprised the bestselling narrative in the history of publishing and the movie franchise held the highest worldwide box office receipts in the history of cinema. The audiobook version shared in this popularity. Narrated by the beloved British comedian Stephen Fry, it, too, was the bestselling audiobook in the history of the medium.
Rowling’s personal story was heartwarming. She was a divorced single mother who’d written the bulk of her first book while collecting public assistance. The first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had been commissioned for a modest print run of 1,000 copies—those editions were now worth tens of thousands of dollars. The popular narrative, however, tended to focus more on the “rags” section of her story than the “riches,” and this obscured her fearsome business sense. Globalization had made intellectual property assets more valuable than ever before, and Rowling had a knack for maximizing the franchise power at her command. She was the new Walt Disney, implanting a beloved set of characters into the public imagination and then transforming them into immortal, cash-spewing business assets. By the end of the decade she would be publishing’s first billionaire. And, as always, the value of her intellectual property relied critically on the vigorous suppression of bootleggers.
Rowling had hired a law firm by the name of Addleshaw Goddard to do the dirty work. The copyright experts at Addleshaw Goddard were clever—and apparently quite well connected. In late June 2007, Ellis received an update request from Nominet, the domain name registrar that hosted the website Oink.me.uk. The email noted that, while Ellis had provided his name, the company did not have an address on file, as required by policy. Could he provide his current forwarding address and postal code, simply for billing purposes? Otherwise, there was a risk the domain name could be deleted.