Newzbin Usenet Indexer Liable For Copyright Infringement

An anonymous reader writes "The world's most popular Usenet indexing site, Newzbin, has been trounced in London's High Court by the movie studios. Held liable for the infringements of its users, later this week Newzbin will be subjected to an injunction which will force it to filter out illegal copies of movies from its NZB index. From the article: 'Newzbin’s help guides were referred to in the decision. They state that the site can help people find what they're looking for, "whether that be obscure music, tv shows, games or movies. Think of us as a TV guide, but we're a guide that applies to Usenet." ... Newzbin has members called "editors" who help to compile reports on material to be found on Usenet. Newzbin's own documentation was used to show that the site encouraged editors to post links to movies. The verdict notes that to assist editors useful links to IMDb and VCDQuality are provided, the latter being useful to provide information about "screeners."'"

Comments

Re:Somebody violated the first rule of usenet

[Brett Buck]

Gopher!

Re:Recommendations for an Indexing service?

[bds1986]

Nice try, MPAA.

Don't Get Caught, Derp!

[Greyfox]

Honestly, if you're going to base your ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL around something illegal, don't fucking TALK about that shit! For God's sake! Ok look at Bernie Madoff, he successfully didn't get caught for decades, even when several very smart people were yelling at the FTC that what he was doing had to be fraud! How? He didn't talk about it! When the FTC came 'round and asked "Hey, are you defrauding people" he was all like "No!" and then he made fun of them for even asking and they felt so bad about questioning him about it, they just kind of wandered off.

The wrong way to go about basing your business around illegal stuff would be to, say, have meetings about how everything you're doing is completely illegal and then sending your meeting minutes to the ISO auditors. That always leads to questions like "This bit here about where you're illegally benefiting from copyright infringement... what's that about?" It goes downhill from there.

If you're uncomfortable being compared to Bernie Madoff perhaps you should consider a career in something less illegal. The rest of you, only have meetings about your illegal stuff in the bathroom with the water running and don't keep minutes of those meetings! For fuck's sake... This isn't rocket science people!

Re:Does Usenet still need tiny size limits on file

[drinkypoo]

Actually, I think that's an argument in favor of larger post lengths. The less pieces there are, the less filling in you have to do, and the less PAR file downloading you'll need to do to support it.