Free music site cleared of fraud

A man who ran a music-sharing website with almost 200,000 members has been found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud at Teesside Crown Court.

Alan Ellis, 26, was the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing.

He operated the site, called Oink, from his flat in Middlesbrough from 2004 until it was closed down in a police raid in 2007.

In that time it facilitated the download of 21 million music files.

The site allowed active members to find other people on the web who were prepared to share files.

Users were required to make a donation to be able to invite friends to join the site.

During the trial, which lasted seven days, it was heard that Mr Ellis received $18,000 (£11,000) a month in donations from people using his website.

Months after getting his degree he had saved £20,000 despite only just starting his software engineer job.

Originally, the site was hosted on his home computer, but by 2007 it had moved to a commercial server in Amsterdam because of the amount of internet traffic it was attracting.

Mr Ellis told the court there was no intention to defraud copyright holders.

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