Andre Yoskowitz
15 Jan 2010 15:46
Alan Ellis, the former admin of the giant private torrent tracker OiNK, has been found not guilty on the charge of conspiracy to defraud, and will walk free.
At its peak, the indexing site had 200,000 members which had shared over 21 million music files.
The prosecutors had claimed that Ellis was receiving £11,000 a month in donations, and that there was $300,000 USD in Ellis' PayPal account. They did not mention that donations went towards paying the servers and hosting fees of the popular site. Ellis says any "surplus" from a monthly donation eventually went towards buying a new server. Ellis did admit, however, that he had £20,000 in savings when the police raided his home.