Newzbin legal stuff.

[Joose]

Not entirely surprised. Ho hum, time to move to one of the other million ways of getting stuff online then.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Newzbin press release:

We are very disappointed with the judgment. Regrettably the court has accepted the distorted and flawed evidence that Hollywood presented. Contrary to the finding of the court our site has not deliberately sought to index infringing material, nor to assist those of our users who use it for that purpose. The site provides a generalised search facility for binary content found on Usenet and not infringing material. Any of the material we index can be found on any one of a thousands of sites on the Internet so pursuit of us is a futile waste of everyones time and money.

Sadly the MPA are stuck in a technology stone age. Rather than addressing their own broken business models & monopolistic commercial practices they seek to curtail innovation and freedom on the Internet. It is notable, for example, that the MPA are the sponsors behind attempts to introduce Chinese internet censorship into the UK through the Digital Enterprise Bill. Perhaps if they used their energy providing what people want rather than buying laws to sustain their own house of cards their might have a stronger future. We certainly reject their attempt to use this decision and our site as an excuse for rushing through undemocratic laws in a wash-up just before an election.

We have lacked the limitless legal funds and legions of lawyers the MPA had and that is the only reason for their win. That said we are looking at our grounds of appeal and how we move forward and continue to provide innovation and search for our users.

Ultimately the dinosaurs of the content industry will need to face reality; the sad thing is that winning cases such as this only damages them and puts their own future in doubt.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cg ... od=boolean

[FatherJack]

I can see how Clark's in-court demonstration of grabbing the Harry Potter film must have looked damning, but his assertion that doing it with a raw Usenet stream rather than an NZB would "clearly be an onerous and inconvenient task and take days to accomplish" was rather misleading. Many newsreaders will stitch together the files for you and even incorporate search engines to find all the parts, meaning the indexed NZBs are only a minor convenience.

The killer was the titles of the categories indexed, plus the assistance given by editors and commenters in giving higher search result prevalance to complete and correct posts, which along with some news comments made by the site owners served to demonstrate, as we knew all along, that they clearly knew what people were using the site for. Which is kind of what matters.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I can't imagine their lawyer owning shares in the company helped much either.

It'll be interesting to see how they change the site to comply.

And how much binsearch slows down

[ProfHawking]

Cant say i'm that surprised.
Wasnt looking good at the point of switching lawyers in the middle

So the question is... will the judgement leave newzbin in any usable form, and if not, what else is there

[Dr. kitteny berk]

So the question is... will the judgement leave newzbin in any usable form, and if not, what else is there

I imagine the indexing part will survive (as that's pretty legit) expect the edited posts bit will die in a fire.

Course, that's basically the same service as binsearch, so not worth paying for.

[fabyak]

Personally I find it curious that the judge only has a single room in his entire house

[Dr. kitteny berk]

[Grimmie]

Dont be silly Fab, he probably had a courtyard too.

Now I just have to download my 60-something gigabytes of smut before it all gets removed.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Newzbin is just an indexing site, and the injunction only covers the copyrights owned by the claimants.

Your special interest nature documentaries will be fine, not to mention there's other sites that do the same job, just not quite as well.

[Grimmie]

Awwwww yeah.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

The next hearing in court is mid April. Until then we are required to implement a default policy of blocking movies and TV reports. These will need to be manually authorised by us before they are published. This is cumbersome and, we appreciate, deeply unwelcome. Rest easy that it is temporary and will only last until we can get into court or until we implement a less onerous automatic felcher.

As of now registrations have been enabled - You will no longer need an invite to signup for a new account.

[TezzRexx]

In view of the, temporary, greatly reduced functionality of the site for many users we are freezing the credits of premium users. Any credits you currently have will remain at their current amount until further notice.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

possibly useful

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Regrettably the Newzbin website has to close as a result of the legal action against us. More details here: http://deepsharer.wordpress.com/2010/05 ... in-gossip/

[FatherJack]

The bit end the end of that article is worth noting. If their code has been stolen, and clone sites spring up, the people running those sites are not likely to be people you want to be giving payment details to.

[TezzRexx]

Time to cancel Newsdemon.

[Grimmie]

Aye, did that yesterday Sad times.

[spoodie]

I wonder how much this will hit usenet services.

I think I just managed to do something useful with binsearch.info. So it may not be a total dead loss.