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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."
Somebody has been breaking the first rule of Usenet
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?
There's an enormous difference between The Pirates Bay and newsbinz.
Newzbin just automatically trawls all the binary newsgroups and automatically creates and index of what it finds. It's a common carrier, just like google. The fact that the binary newgroups have an enormous amount of pirated content is no more the fault of newzbin than the fact that the internet is choc full of disturbing porn is the fault of google.
The Pirates Bay, OTOH, is a site where the admins deliberately remove pirated content that was mislabeled from the site. This, as well as the site name, makes their database deliberately biased to help with piracy. Maybe that is illegal and maybe it isn't, but the point is, what TPB does is different than what newzbin does.
Ok, but it's so easy to take down Google. You know how it works, just enter 'google' into Google... As a collateral, you will also break the Internet that way, but what does the MPA care, anyway.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
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
FTFY.
Now I have. Thanks MPAA.
wait... wat?
"found guilty of indexing"!?!?
wtf does that mean exactly? Guilty of writing a program to search data? Guilty of writing a program to search data and then letting others view the results?
The only way that the MPAA/RIAA even know what is out there is by doing the same thing, the only difference being they aren't providing a service, they are angry about what they found.
What we find ourselves faced with is the guilt or innocence of someone writing software and then *giving away the software and/or the results of the software*. If indexing is a crime, then it is only a very very small step to say that writing software that gives others access to "features" of their hardware that the manufacturer doesn't want to give access to is illegal. After all, without VLC and mplayer it would be pretty easy for Quicktime/iTunes and Microsoft Media player to lock down the watching of illegal movies and listening of illegal music.
Keep walking down that path, and soon we loose all our digital freedoms...
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
"Newzbin should be found guilty of indexing"
Then I think Google should be found guilty of indexing. After all that link provided me with thousands of valid Windows XP CD keys, and Google indexed those sites and provided me with the information, that's illegal, right? Oops, google just gave me valid credit card numbers!
When will Google and all the search engines of the world be brought up on charges and this madness end!?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
There's two very fundamental decisions in the US, the Sony vs Betamax decision and the MGM vs Grokster decision. The essence is that the Betamax decision says infringements are not sufficient in itself as long as there is substantial non-infringing use, but the Grokster decision (9-0 vote) says it's not a general shield against how you design, apply, market, sell and support it. That goes for how you plan it internally, how you market it externally and how you handle support from users. They could go as far as consider things implicit in its domain or construction, for example if I set up an indexer that only indexed warez groups or had search filters only relevant to warez releases that would be used against me as intent.
In short, you have to keep a thick veil between you and infringing users and pretend the 800lb elephant in the room isn't there. You are making a general tool for a general market, once you start straying from that you are very likely to break the law. And it's an extremely good reason why there's normally a zero tolerance policy on warez talk in support forums. You can not legally allow yourself to know.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Newsbin handpicks warez (or even posts them themselves), then creates nzb files and garnishes them with detailed descriptions, only to charge a small fee from everyone who wants access to their "catalog". Quite different from a simple aggregator.
This is not how Newzbin works at all. It's community-driven. Paying users can 'editorialize' the search results by marking posts of interest and grouping together files in "reports." These reports can have a title, description, article IDs, filenames, and then other users can post comments on them. Newzbin, itself, provides nothing but an index of Usenet headers.