With a million bucks at stake, Morris put his hand out, flicked his thumb, and the coin flew high into the air.

CHAPTER 19

Shortly after his arrest, Her Majesty’s Government announced its intention to prosecute Alan Ellis for conspiracy to defraud. The prosecutors contended that the bank accounts full of cash and the limited-invitation user base were all evidence that Oink was a scheme for Ellis’ personal enrichment. Ellis’ arrest came just two months after Glover’s bust in the parking lot, but there was no link between the two. They were the product of two separate investigations—Operation Fastlink in the U.S. and Operation Ark Royal in the UK.

The charges provoked a backlash. Was Ellis really a fraudster? If so, he was perhaps the most honest fraudster alive. The money laundering charges against his father were the result of investigative confusion, and had quickly been dropped. Ellis’ own paper trail showed that, although it had taken in over £200,000 in donations over three years, Oink had barely broken even, and by the end of its life had been running hosting bills of £6,000 a month. Any excess cash was stored in a “war chest,” where Ellis was budgeting it to purchase even larger dedicated servers. Although the large number of bank accounts looked suspicious, there was no evidence to show that Ellis ever spent any of the money on himself.

He was an amateur in the purest sense. He just really loved music, and technology. The users of his site matched this profile; these were fanboys, not criminals. Within 48 hours of the raid that shut down Oink, two new sites had appeared: Waffles.fm and What.cd, both run by former Oink administrators. The sites were explicitly patterned after Oink, and their Web domains resolved to the Federated States of Micronesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, respectively, although of course the sites weren’t actually hosted in these far-flung locations. Further Web traces led to shell corporations in Panama, and who was behind those was anyone’s guess. In the wake of raids on both Oink and the Pirate Bay, anonymity was critical, and the new operators were determined not to repeat Ellis’ mistakes.

Within a few years What.cd’s music archive grew to surpass even Oink’s at its peak. Among the torrents it hosted were more than 45 different versions of Pink Moon, as well as a 15-gigabyte torrent of the 154-hour, 103-CD set of Stephen Fry reading all 4,224 pages of the Harry Potter series in its entirety. Torrent traffic was cresting worldwide, and by some estimates represented as much as one-third of all prime-time Internet traffic. Whatever the Crown’s goals were in prosecuting Ellis, one thing was clear: the prosecution had no deterrent effect. To the contrary, it seemed to act like advertising for torrent technology, as a similar prosecution had for the Pirate Bay.

But for the copyright defenders this was a question of justice. After seizing the server in Holland, investigators had run it through the standard battery of forensic analysis techniques. This had led to the outing of a large number of Oink uploaders, with a particular focus on those who had managed to source prerelease material. The Crown presented this as a triumph, and the tabloids, taking officials at their word, incorrectly began to refer to Oink as “the leading source of prerelease music in the world.” (Meanwhile, the real leading source of prerelease music in the world was sitting at home in North Carolina, awaiting arraignment. His investigation still ongoing, Vu hadn’t alerted the reporters to the bust, and the only media attention Glover ever got was a single mention at the bottom of an overlooked FBI press release.)

In a handful of scattered interviews with the press before the trial, Ellis maintained his innocence. He continued to insist that running a torrent tracker did not break the law, as Oink had only provided links to pirated material and did not actually host the music itself. Even his own barrister, Alex Stein, a specialist in intellectual property cases, disagreed with this legal interpretation, and would have advised his client to plead guilty to a charge of copyright infringement. But Ellis was never charged with that crime. Instead, the prosecutors had seized upon the bank accounts as evidence that Oink was a racketeering operation, a crime that carried a prison sentence of up to ten years. Here Stein prepared a robust defense.

The proceedings opened on January 5, 2010. Making the case for Her Majesty’s Government was prosecutor Peter Makepeace, a blustery model of bewigged British pomposity whose primary legal tactic was to haul Ellis into the witness box and repeatedly call him a liar. Even as he did so, though, he betrayed his own limited understanding of the facts of the case, and at times seemed almost proud of his cluelessness. While discussing the material hosted on the site, he referred multiple times to “a band called 50 Cents,” and, after being informed that the site had migrated to Linux, he engaged in the following exchange:

Makepeace: Whereabouts were they based?

Ellis: I think they were in Canada. I don’t know where.

Makepeace: A place called Linux?

Ellis: I don’t know.

After ten days of this, the trial concluded. Stein, giving his closing argument, noticed the jury nodding their heads in agreement and felt confident about his client’s chances. Makepeace, giving his closing argument, said that “Oink was like the robot in Terminator 2.” His theatrics were ineffective—the Crown’s portrayal of Oink as an unstoppable cyborg run by a pathological liar determined to rip off the honest members of 50 Cents from its headquarters in the town of Linux, Canada, did not mesh very well with the existing facts. When the jury retired on January 15, 2010, it took them less than two hours to reach the “not guilty” verdict.

Standing outside the courtroom in victory, Stein advised his client that, in his professional legal opinion, Ellis was a very lucky young man. Ellis agreed with this assessment. Stein told Ellis that he now had two choices: he could go outside to meet with the waiting scrum of journalists from the British tabloid press and attempt to explain to those assembled dignitaries why he had done what he did. Or he could leave through the back entrance, duck the press entirely, and make a graceful exit from public life. Ellis chose the latter. He returned to Middlesbrough by bus, and set about deleting all traces of his identity from the Internet.

The founders of the Pirate Bay were not so lucky. Their aggressive courting of controversy made them less sympathetic figures, and the Swedish prosecutors had done their homework. In November 2010 three of the site’s founders were given prison sentences ranging from four to ten months. Svartholm Warg, the author of the love letter to DreamWorks, fled to Cambodia in an attempt to avoid extradition. (He later served a two-year sentence.) But despite the jailing and exile of its original leadership, the site thrived, and would remain the leading piracy portal on the Web for years to come.

This resiliency was no accident. The torrenters organized themselves into complex groups with well-defined hierarchies. They hid their identities behind pseudonyms and facilitated the distribution of online contraband. They understood that what they were doing was illegal, and did it anyway, with no obvious benefits to themselves. To law enforcement that made them criminals, but to a growing number of people they were starting to look like political dissidents.