Penthouse.com Goes After Usenet Posters

Shibumi writes: " Penthouse.com is starting to pursue legal action against persons who post material to Usenet from their pay site." At least they're going after the poster and not the usenet servers.

Comments

Pr0n wants to be free...

[A Big Gnu Thrush]

...that's free as in handjobs, not free as in speech.

Articles

[sstrick]

But I only post the articles honest...

Re:hrm

[jbarnett]

Yes Metallica should go after the users trading the mp3 files, not after napaster. The users are commiting the crime, not Napaster.

Think about it, go into a head shop, buy a bong then go smoke some weed out of it. When Mr. Police Man sees you smoking pot, who is he going to arrest, you or the head shop.

What law did the head shop break? None. What law did Napaster break? None.

Did you break a law when you started smoking pot? Yes (At least under the current laws in the United States). Did you break a law when you started trading copyrighted mp3's? Yes (At least under the current copyright laws in the United States).

Did usenet or [insert isp here] break any laws when they made there newsgroups public? No. Did you break any laws when you posted copyrighted porn to these news groups. Yes (At least under the current copyright laws in the United States).

So who is responiable you or the head shop? Who broke the law, you or the head shop? Who should get fined or put in jail, you or the head shop?

Napaster *CAN* be used for legal purposes as what the company claims, as bongs and newsgroups *CAN* be used for legal purposes as what the companies claim.

You can used Napaster to trade legal mp3's (like self-written, self-produced material) as you can use both bongs (for smoking tobacco) and newsgroups (for posting self-produced material). All which are pretty legal.

Does anyone use these things for legal purposes though? No not really, maybe 0.00002 % of the entire population.

Please take responiablity for your actions, even if sometimes you actions are illegal and may laid you in jail.

Person, not personS, and not out of line

[Northern Hunter]

They are pursuing action against one single individual, who was COMPLETELY mirroring absolutely EVERYTHING in near realtime, from Penthouse's internal pay-site to Usenet.

Literally hours after being put up, shoots were appearing on Usenet.

In the time since the story (May 2) another person or two have taken up the 'mirroring'. I haven't heard whether he/they/(she?) have been brought to task yet or not.

hrm

[jbarnett]

This is really good IMHO. Not that people are stealing porn, or penthouse is showing off it's huge uh legal team, but they are doing it the right way.

See, they go after the poster, the one that commited the crime, slap him with a small fine and embrass the hell out of him so he doesn't do it again, penthouse gets from cash from it and everyone is happy.

If penthouse decided to go after the news group or hosting provided, this would be a bad thing almost as stupid as if Metallica went after Napaster instead of the users.

Metallica could learn a lot about the way penthouse is handling this. Like I said a million times before, dam Metallica really needs to get some porn and just fsck chill out.