Oink Founder Collected £20,000 In Donations

oink A court has heard how a Teesside man received £11,000 a month in donations from users of UK-based file-sharing service Oink.

Only months after leaving university, Oink founder Alan Ellis had managed to save £20,000 across several bank accounts.

The BBC reports that Oink was closed down in 2007 but only after 200,000 members downloaded over 21 million files. Members were obliged to make a donation to Oink in order to be able to invite friends to sign up to the service.

The trial continues, although Ellis has insisted that he didn’t intend to make money and any excess donations were to be used to purchase a new server to host his bedroom-based service. However, by the time the service was closed down, hosting had migrated to a more resilient commercial service based in Amsterdam.

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Ellis, a 26 year old from Middlesborough, denies conspiracy to defraud.

Story by Tim Difford

A leading innovator in the IT Outsourcing industry, Tim is often on the move but can be regularly found in Manchester and London, UK. His f (show all) A leading innovator in the IT Outsourcing industry, Tim is often on the move but can be regularly found in Manchester and London, UK. His focus is on social and mobile technologies but given half a chance he'll try to sneak music or football into his blog-posts. Tim can be found at One Greener Day and you can also follow @timdifford on Twitter.