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Newzbin.com Usenet Indexing Trial Set To Begin Next Week
An anonymous reader writes "Only a few weeks after a jury acquitted Alan Ellis, the owner of the BitTorrent site 'OinK's Pink Palace,' of copyright infringement, another high profile case is about to start next week, this time for the newsgroup side of things. The MPA (Motion Picture Association) trial against Newzbin.com, a website that indexes NZB files and content on the newsgroups, will begin in London on Monday. Will lightning strike twice in favor of website indexing?"
Torrentfreak points out one major difference between the cases: "Ellis’s charge was one of fraud, allegedly conducted by an individual and dealt with under criminal law, while that leveled against Newzbin is one of allowing and inducing illegal copying, i.e copyright infringement, but carried out by a bona fide company under civil law."
Unlike, say, The Pirate Bay, Newzbin.com will apparently cooperate with takedown requests. Yet they're getting sued anyway.
Way to be a shining example of rationality there, MPA.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Why are all these cases aimed at people who merely index content? Filehosters like Rapidshare and Megaupload are not only actually hosting and distributing the files themselves, but their whole business revolves around copyright infringement. People pay for premium service to download more illegal stuff faster, and they generate so much ad money from high traffic only because of the infringing files they make available. Finally, they would be a more logical target for civil suit since they actually have money to loose.
I have no sympathy for either of the *AAs and I understand some of these points apply to other sites to some extent, but I don't understand why they choose to overlook the juiciest targets.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law