Oink's Pink Palace
defunct BitTorrent tracker and music sharing community website
Oink's Pink Palace (frequently stylized as OiNK) was a prominent BitTorrent tracker which operated from 2004 to 2007. Following a two-year investigation by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the site was shut down on 23 October 2007, by British and Dutch police agencies. These music industry organisations described OiNK as an "online pirate pre-release music club", whereas former users described it as one of the world's largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories. About a month before the shut-down, music magazine Blender elected OiNK's creator, British software engineer Alan Ellis, to their The Powergeek 25 – the Most Influential People in Online Music list.
Alan Ellis was tried for conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown Court, the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing, and found not guilty on 15 January 2010.
Background
Oink's Pink Palace was launched in 2004. OiNK was an invitation-only BitTorrent community, with about 180,000 members. When closed by the authorities, the site had stored about 200,000 torrent files. One of OiNK's rules was that users could not pay to gain membership to the site, but had an opportunity to donate money to the site. Members were required to maintain minimum upload-to-download ratios, and to have cute avatars.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Oink's Pink Palace” as defunct BitTorrent tracker and music sharing community website. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3881305. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2007 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oink's Pink Palace” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.