Goodbye, Oink

It’s a tumultuous time for music lovers nowadays. Personally, this year was for me the costliest of my life, music-wise (probably commiserate with my increased ability to bring home the bacon). I travelled to New York City twice for Live Earth and Farm Aid, I saw several $100+ concerts, and generally have gone to excess in said category. However, I, like many others, have spent fewer and fewer dollars than ever on actual music, in the form of CD’s and DRM-restricted digital formats (and let’s not start on the tragedy that is cell phone ringtones!). The rub is that I think I’m doing a great service to the music and musicians I love, but to some I’m a criminal.

You see, one of my favorite sites ever, oink.cd, was shut down in private sector legal shake-down that could likely take away the freedom of one or more individuals. I’m not going to rattle off reasons this was wrong, or tell you how to help become part of the solution, because it’s all very eloquently stated here in far better terms than I aspire to (stick through the long read, it’s worth it). My goal is to show my support, in every way I can, and maybe my meager influence in the digital world will help the fight (along with my very physical donation to the oink.cd legal defense fund – contribute yourself by following the link through here).

As an aside, one of the worst things to come from this in the geek perspective, is the villany that has been expelled upon the bittorrent file transfer protocol. The protocol is an elegant, fair, fast, reliable, decentralized way of transferring data. The fact that it’s the vehicle of choice for music lovers wishing to be part of that community has been used as a reason to slander the protocol, though that’s very unlikely to diminish it’s impact in the long run.

Here’s another gem to mull over right now – according to the news here at torrentfreak, the Pirate Bay is coming out with a pure tribute oink alternative, called boink.cd! You have to hand it to the folks at the Pirate Bay – they may not be the best torrent search engine ever, but they firmly believe in a free exchange of data, and are courageous enough to risk their liberty to force change worldwide. You just have to wonder how invulnerable they truly are.