Continuing its long-running (nine years! how slow are these people?) tradition of smashing blobs of mercury with hammers, the Cartel have forced the popular torrent-tracking site Oink to shut down. Dramatic police raids and exaggerated quotes make for good show, if nothing else.

You really should visit that page, if only for amusement value. Mmm, tasty waffles.

Oink was a private, members-only site that facilitated trading. If you're trading your own originals that's legal. If you're making copies and swapping them with friends, that may be illegal. According to the BBC story what appears to have really cheesed off the Cartel was the trading of pre-release albums.

Not everyone is pleased that the site was taken down, least of all the reputed 180,000 members. DJ Rupture posted a thought piece mourning the demise of the site, which he found contained everything he had ever released. He thinks about BitTorrent and sites like Oink in terms of their relationship to music fans and music as a money-making business. It's a good read from someone who's in the business and gets that you can't win this war by smashing more and more blobs of mercury with bigger and bigger hammers.

(Props to Webreakstuff for the original pointer.)