Oink website admin wins criminal case, but could face civil suit

The UK's closest equivalent to the Pirate Bay - a peer-to-peer media and software-sharing website called Oink - escaped criminal punishment after a jury cleared its proprietor, Alan Ellis, of charges that he had violated copyrights and bilked musicians out of funds. However, the British music industry is now threatening civil action against Ellis in a further attempt to get the website shut down.

Tech news site eWeek Europe reports that the industry would target the £185,000 that Ellis is said to have made from operating the site, which uses BitTorrent technology to complicate efforts to track and identify the specific sources of shared files.

International Federation of the Phonographic Industry chairman John Kennedy told the Daily Telegraph that it was ironic that, although the industry won its court case against the original Pirate Bay website, it was still operational - while they lost the case against Oink yet managed to get it shut down.

File-sharing services have been at the heart of endless legal battles since the advent of Napster in the late 1990s, as musicians, the music industry, and listeners spar over the shape of digital music to come.