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

[icebraining]

The issue with attacking NNTP has been that those who run NNTP services don't control the content whatsoever. They aren't held responsible for what's uploaded to their servers, and I think this is a fundamental issue with regarding net-neutrality.

What? NNTP servers store the content, while bittorrent servers (both the torrent files repositories and the trackers) never do. In fact, if you decouple the .torrent file sharing from the tracker, you can have trackers that know nothing about the content, not even the torrent name (only some hashes), or even trackerless torrents.

Bittorrent is much harder to stop; the only way to do it is to convince each ISP to implement DPI filters and play cat and mouse with the developers of bittorrent clients, and it'll only end if they basically turn the Internet into TV 2.0.

Re:Somebody violated the first rule of usenet

[harl]

In what we call P2P sharing, the down-loaders are also uploading multiple copies too, causing them to be easy to sue seriously.

But can you prove that in court? If you send someone 99.9% of a torrent will they be able to watch the movie? If it's rared they won't even be able to open it.

You didn't make a copy. Oh you copied part of it? How does that work without making use of the digit 1 infringement against every copyrighted work ever?

With BT style P2P it's possible to never send anyone the full work. This includes the original seeder. How have you made a copy at that point?

It's a legal loophole. No one makes a copy yet everyone ends up with a copy. There's no law against possession of an illegally made copy the only crime is illegally making a copy.

This is why they had to create the secondary crime of contributing to or accessory to copyright infringement.