5punk

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.

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

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.

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.