Although newsgroups had largely remained outside of the focus of lawsuits aimed at P2P users, the media industry has started to notice.
In response, major ISPs have discontinued their support of newsgroups or restricted them only to news reports.
The only major newsgroups that are remaining are Giganews and major indexing services such as Newzbin. Slyck defines Newzbin as operating “similarly to BitTorrent indexing sites, as they both act like card catalogs in a library. Similar to BitTorrent indexing/tracking sites, Newzbin contains no copyrighted work on their servers - only NZB files. NZB files are analogous to torrent files; like torrent files, NZB point the user to where the file is located on the network.”
It appears Newzbin is expecting lawsuits however just like their BitTorrent indexing brothers and the company announced today that it has “received two distinct complaints” regarding the service they employ.
“It is likely that we will in the coming weeks be presented with a court case and have to defend our rights,” the announcement reads. “We will be defending ourselves vigorously against both the complainants if necessary and we believe a court will agree with our view that linking to content on Usenet is indeed legal and our method of dealing with unlawful content is appropriate. We believe that, or we wouldn’t still be here.”
Result for: newzbin
The premier Usenet indexing site Newzbin has announced that it is now under attack from the MPAA and it seems the the service will either have to change significantly or face a shutdown.
Newzbin is the creator of the NZB format, generally considered to be Usenet’s equivalent of a .torrent file. Usenet was generally considered to be complicated to use before the format emerged.
It seems the MPAA has noticed as well however. Newzbin administrator ‘Caesium’ made this announcement last week:
“Newzbin has today received a letter from the Motion Picture Association (MPA). In the letter, they claim that some editors may be reporting material from Usenet that is infringing the copyright of their members.
While these claims have not been substantiated, it should be noted that Newzbin does not condone the distribution or indexing of such materials. We will immediately act to remove any items that are found to be infringing copyright.
Please take a moment to refer to our Terms and Conditions, in particular sections 4 and 4.2.
Please note that we may revoke privileges, or ban accounts, of users found to be violating these Terms and Conditions.”
The MPAA could have issues however. The company complies completely with UK laws and they remove any infringing files when notified. In the past the MPAA has shut down several US-based NZB sites such as NZB-Zone and forced others to adjust the way they operate.
Caesium also noted that there might have to be changes implemented for the site to keep running, such as having all “.NZB related reports removed.” They could also follow the arrangement of BinNews.com which removed “only the posts related to movies and TV shows,” when the MPAA came knocking.
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