Ellis consciously cultivated this ethos. Most private trackers failed. The site operators were standoffish and uncommunicative, and as a result the members didn’t upload enough material. Ellis, by contrast, mandated civility of discourse, even as he urged his members to develop ever greater levels of both musical snobbery and technical skill. He seemed at times to promote an almost utopian vision, except his utopia actually worked. The result was illegal, of course, but it was also something of great value, produced cooperatively, and built in naked opposition to the expectations of in-kind reward that supposedly governed human behavior in the capitalist age.

Ellis’ life during this period took on simple, almost monastic dimensions. He lived in a shared apartment in a shit town in the middle of nowhere, commuted in the morning to a hump job no one cared about, then returned each day as the venerable abbot of the online world. On file-sharing forums across the Internet, Oink invites became a scarce commodity, and were sometimes even traded for money. (Ellis discouraged this.) On those forums too, the anonymous pirate captain Oink was feted and praised.

A less friendly sort of attention came from rights-holders. By 2007, the site’s inbox was overflowing with takedown emails, and the pretense of polite dialogue had been dropped in favor of threatening legalese. M.I.A., the Go! Team, and Prince all succeeded in having their record catalogs pulled from the site. Other, less familiar players did too. “The TUBE BAR prank calls are not public domain and are copyrighted by Bum Bar Bastards LLC and exclusively distributed by T.A. Productions,” read a memorable notice. “We demand that you cease its unauthorised distribution of our copyrighted content.”

Ellis began to worry about his exposure. Oink had gotten too big, too quickly. There were too many users and too little new material for them to source. The most common complaint from the newly invited was that “there was nothing left to upload.” The best way to maintain your ratio on Oink was to find something totally new, and as the site expanded, the best way to do that was to infiltrate the recording industry’s supply chain any way you could. Leaked material started to appear on Oink, sometimes weeks early. Often these were Glover’s own leaks, but sometimes Oink’s user base, driven by the relentless economy of download ratios, started scooping even RNS.

Ellis was not a member of the Scene, and he was not interested in infiltrating the record companies’ supply chains. He was an archivist, not a leaker, and he knew that the prerelease game brought attention he didn’t need. Seeking to mitigate the problem, he began to consider opening other media verticals that would allow his new users to meaningfully contribute without leaking. Television and movies were out, as other private trackers were already operating in those spaces, and there was an unwritten consensus between site operators not to tread on one another’s turf. He decided, finally, that he would permit the uploading of audiobooks.

For a site that had already pirated the vast majority of recorded music in history, it sounded like an inconsequential decision, but Ellis had just tampered with one of the primal forces of nature. J. K. Rowling was by this time well on her way to becoming the wealthiest author in the history of ink. Her seven-book Harry Potter saga had broken all known sales records and been translated into 67 languages, including West Frisian and ancient Greek. An eight-picture movie deal with Warner Brothers had turned young stars Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe into household names. The literary franchise comprised the bestselling narrative in the history of publishing and the movie franchise held the highest worldwide box office receipts in the history of cinema. The audiobook version shared in this popularity. Narrated by the beloved British comedian Stephen Fry, it, too, was the bestselling audiobook in the history of the medium.

Rowling’s personal story was heartwarming. She was a divorced single mother who’d written the bulk of her first book while collecting public assistance. The first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had been commissioned for a modest print run of 1,000 copies—those editions were now worth tens of thousands of dollars. The popular narrative, however, tended to focus more on the “rags” section of her story than the “riches,” and this obscured her fearsome business sense. Globalization had made intellectual property assets more valuable than ever before, and Rowling had a knack for maximizing the franchise power at her command. She was the new Walt Disney, implanting a beloved set of characters into the public imagination and then transforming them into immortal, cash-spewing business assets. By the end of the decade she would be publishing’s first billionaire. And, as always, the value of her intellectual property relied critically on the vigorous suppression of bootleggers.

Rowling had hired a law firm by the name of Addleshaw Goddard to do the dirty work. The copyright experts at Addleshaw Goddard were clever—and apparently quite well connected. In late June 2007, Ellis received an update request from Nominet, the domain name registrar that hosted the website Oink.me.uk. The email noted that, while Ellis had provided his name, the company did not have an address on file, as required by policy. Could he provide his current forwarding address and postal code, simply for billing purposes? Otherwise, there was a risk the domain name could be deleted.

Ellis complied with this request. He had never taken steps to hide his identity in the first place, and despite the barrage of cease and desist emails the site was receiving, he still genuinely believed that what he was doing was legal. The next day, Nominet sent him a follow-up note thanking him for updating his contact information, then informed him that they had turned all this information over to Rowling’s lawyers.

Ellis was furious with Nominet. He felt that his rights under the UK’s Data Protection Act had been violated. He immediately changed the site’s domain registration from “Oink.me.uk” to “Oink.cd,” cleverly punning on the country code for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ellis continued to administer the site from the UK, of course, and the servers remained in Holland, but the change meant that you could no longer find him in the registry’s public database. In a post to the site’s front page, he opaquely outlined “legal” reasons for the changes.

But he took no further precautions—perhaps because he continued to insist that he wasn’t actually doing anything wrong. Ellis’ argument was that his site did not actually host any copyrighted files. And, technically speaking, this was true. Oink hosted only torrents. The files those torrents linked to were located not on the Holland server but instead in a distributed library that existed on computers around the globe. Had Ellis bothered to consult a lawyer, he would have quickly learned that the law did not respect this distinction. But he never did.

Rowling’s lawyers passed Ellis’ contact information to the police the same day they received it. They also passed it on to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The IFPI was the global counterpart to the United States’ RIAA. It lobbied global trade organizations for stricter copyright protection, certified gold and platinum records internationally, and ran its own antipiracy unit staffed with seasoned detectives pulled from Interpol and Scotland Yard. The private dicks weren’t especially interested in collectivist arguments about the nature of private property. They simply saw a site that incentivized music leaking while pulling in a hell of a lot of cash. And when they saw the username “Oink,” they didn’t see a revolutionary or an idealist—they saw a racketeer.