Ellis complied with this request. He had never taken steps to hide his identity in the first place, and despite the barrage of cease and desist emails the site was receiving, he still genuinely believed that what he was doing was legal. The next day, Nominet sent him a follow-up note thanking him for updating his contact information, then informed him that they had turned all this information over to Rowling’s lawyers.
Ellis was furious with Nominet. He felt that his rights under the UK’s Data Protection Act had been violated. He immediately changed the site’s domain registration from “Oink.me.uk” to “Oink.cd,” cleverly punning on the country code for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ellis continued to administer the site from the UK, of course, and the servers remained in Holland, but the change meant that you could no longer find him in the registry’s public database. In a post to the site’s front page, he opaquely outlined “legal” reasons for the changes.
But he took no further precautions—perhaps because he continued to insist that he wasn’t actually doing anything wrong. Ellis’ argument was that his site did not actually host any copyrighted files. And, technically speaking, this was true. Oink hosted only torrents. The files those torrents linked to were located not on the Holland server but instead in a distributed library that existed on computers around the globe. Had Ellis bothered to consult a lawyer, he would have quickly learned that the law did not respect this distinction. But he never did.
Rowling’s lawyers passed Ellis’ contact information to the police the same day they received it. They also passed it on to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The IFPI was the global counterpart to the United States’ RIAA. It lobbied global trade organizations for stricter copyright protection, certified gold and platinum records internationally, and ran its own antipiracy unit staffed with seasoned detectives pulled from Interpol and Scotland Yard. The private dicks weren’t especially interested in collectivist arguments about the nature of private property. They simply saw a site that incentivized music leaking while pulling in a hell of a lot of cash. And when they saw the username “Oink,” they didn’t see a revolutionary or an idealist—they saw a racketeer.
But if Oink was a criminal, he wasn’t a very good one. Until recently, he had been running the server from his house, with his IP address available for anyone to see. He had logged all site activity, with users’ upload and download histories stored right next to their names and email. And with two seconds of research into the Internet’s domain name registry, you could get Oink’s real name: “Alan Ellis.”
The evidence trail amounted to the easiest bust in the history of online piracy. On Tuesday, October 23, 2007, Ellis woke before dawn to prepare for another day in the IT pit at the chemical company in downtown Middlesbrough. He took a shower in his apartment’s shared bathroom, then returned to his bedroom, where his girlfriend, having spent the night, was still asleep. As he did every morning, he logged into Oink as administrator, checked the server logs, and read the overnight messages from his deputized lieutenants. Then the door slammed open and a dozen police officers swarmed into his room.
All ten of Ellis’ bank accounts were frozen simultaneously. Across the country in Manchester, his father was inexplicably arrested as well, and charged with money laundering. Alan Ellis’ home computer was seized as evidence. So were the Holland servers, which contained the IP and email addresses of all 180,000 Oink members. Unlike the Pirate Bay administrators, Ellis had not planned for this contingency, and the torrents Oink served went dark.
The police grilled Ellis for over an hour in his apartment. He was reluctant to speak. The sun came up outside. He was invited to the police station for further conversation. Looking to make a show of force, the cops had alerted the UK’s tabloid press, who had been waiting outside Ellis’ building since daybreak. Handcuffed, he was escorted from his bedroom and into the glare of the photographers’ flashing lights.
CHAPTER 17
Glover’s duffel bag was nearly full. By the end of 2006 he had leaked nearly 2,000 CDs. He was no longer afraid of getting caught. He could tell that, unlike his old Universal bosses, the new plant management at EDC couldn’t care less. Despite all their public complaints about the leaks, Universal’s supply chain was less secure than ever.
Right before the handover, Universal had once again upgraded the production lines, and the plant could now produce a million compact discs a day. But that was the final improvement. The plant was now a wasting asset, and was being run accordingly. Since the handover, no new equipment had been installed. There had been a hiring freeze. Basic maintenance was being left undone. Morale was low and a lot of the employees were starting to look for new work. Still, Glover was getting his overtime shifts in, as overseeing the packaging line was ever more difficult. Nearly every major release now came in multiple editions, with bonus DVDs and foldout posters and deluxe album art.
None of this mattered to Kali. His approach was as mercenary as that of Doug Morris—the most important leak of the year was the album that sold the most copies, and the chart was the only thing that mattered. In 2006 RNS had once again sourced the top leak of the year, weaseling their way inside Sony to pull Some Hearts, the debut album from American Idol winner Carrie Underwood. They had added to this with leaks from Rascal Flatts, James Blunt, and Kelly Clarkson. The shift in audiences—from urban to rural, from young men to older women, from teenagers to their parents—was telling. For the major labels, the most important sales demographics in music were those who didn’t know how to share.
RNS didn’t stop there. The campaign of infiltration was complete, and the entire industry, from the largest corporate player to the smallest indie, was now lousy with RNS plants. In 2006, the group leaked more than 4,000 releases from across the musical spectrum. The names on the NFOs that year read like the invite list for the Grammys: Akon, Ani DiFranco, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Beyoncé, Billy Ray Cyrus, Bob Seger, Built to Spill, Busta Rhymes, the Buzzcocks, Christina Aguilera, DJ Shadow, Elvis Costello, the Foo Fighters, the Game, Ghostface Killah, Gucci Mane, Hilary Duff, Hot Chip, the Indigo Girls, Insane Clown Posse, Jars of Clay, Jimmy Buffett, John Legend, Kenny Rogers, Korn, LCD Soundsystem, Madonna, Morrissey, My Chemical Romance, Neil Young, Nelly Furtado, Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Omarion, Pearl Jam, Pharrell, Pitbull, Primus, Prince, Public Enemy, Regina Spektor, Rick Ross, Rihanna, the Roots, the Scissor Sisters, Shakira, Stereolab, Sting, Taylor Swift, Three 6 Mafia, Toby Keith, Tony Bennett, Tool, and “Weird Al” Yankovic.
The scale of activity was taxing, and many members of RNS were outgrowing it. When the music Scene had gotten its start in 1996, most of the participants were teenagers. Now those same pioneers were approaching 30, and the glamour was fading. Plus, the leakers tended to decline in value as they grew older. They outgrew their jobs at college radio stations or found more lucrative careers than music journalism. They gained a better appreciation of the legal risks, or accumulated undesirable baggage like social lives or scruples.
Listening to hundreds of new releases a year could lead to a kind of jaded auditory cynicism. The uniform blandness of the corporate sound wasn’t helping. The musicians all used auto-tune to pitch-correct their voices; the songwriters all copied the last big hit; the same handful of producers worked on every track. Glover didn’t connect with rap in the way he used to. Tony Dockery had been born again, and listened only to gospel. Simon Tai still hung around the chat channel, but he hadn’t leaked an album in years. Even Kali seemed a little bored. There were no more worlds left to conquer.