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Dutch Usenet Provider Ordered To Remove Infringing Content

Posted by Soulskill on from the trouble-in-the-usenets dept.

dutchwhizzman writes "Amsterdam-based Usenet wholesale provider News Service Europe has been mandated by a court to remove all copyright-infringing content on their servers, or face severe financial penalties. Dutch copyright organization BREIN has won a court case making the Usenet provider responsible for the content posted on platforms other than their own. Could this be the end of Usenet as we know it, or will an appeal be won by NSE? Why didn't the judge make the provider that allowed the posts responsible? Why didn't the judge honor the 'cancel message' procedure that technically exists in the NNTP protocol?"

22 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. usenet warez by tech4 · · Score: 2

    News-Service.com sold their services to the likes of Binverse and Usenext, so it's not really surprising. While it takes away sad piece of history, the leeches and warez destroyed it. While some people still use it for talking, for the common people and most of the world it's just like BitTorrent. Not like I agree with the situation, but if something that is a major problem needs to be shut down and for the few using it for legal purposes need to move to something else, well, it's not surprise move.

    While still being somewhat similar to ISP's and contraty to popular belief here on Slashdot, it's the intent that counts. That's why ThePirateBay was also found quilty in court.

    1. Re:usenet warez by Anthony+Mouse · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I am curious as to how they will determine what is and is not copyright-infringing content.

      By shutting down access to everything, obviously. There is no other possible way to do it because there is no automated way to determine who the copyright owner for a piece of text is or whether it was properly licensed.

  2. Re:Why is this posted? by Jackie_Chan_Fan · · Score: 2

    I dont know what you're talking about... but I agree :P

  3. Re:Why is this posted? by wierd_w · · Score: 2

    You aren't fooling anyone AC.

    We all know that the REAL way you got good at using regular expressions was by bulk downloading alt.sex.binaries, then using ls, grep, and rm to automatically remove all the kiddie porn before the fbi became the porn police.

    You only refuse to talk about it now out of fear of goons knocking in the door. ;)

  4. Usenet as I knew it by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Could this be the end of Usenet as we know it

    Usenet as I knew it was a bulletin board system for worldwide discussion of all kinds of subjects under the sun, from politics to auto mechanics to cigars to, of course, Star Trek - For me it was never a place to download gigabytes of binaries of Fringe episodes. To me, SPAM killed usenet, not a binaries ban.

    1. Re:Usenet as I knew it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Usenet has issues (I don't use it anymore either), but Usenet was the best-moderated discussion forum in the history of civilization. It was moderated by your NNTP client. When will web-based forums achieve that level of perfection?

    2. Re:Usenet as I knew it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Register on eternal-september.org and it still can be. They dropped all .binaries forums and only host the primarily text based discussions, which allow them to mirror the majority of important usenet stuff for only a fraction of the bandwidth. Even better they have options to allow mirorring of their copies.

    3. Re:Usenet as I knew it by idontgno · · Score: 2

      You lived a very sheltered USENET life.

      From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations."

      The wild west was wild. Now the agribusiness farmers have moved in, platted the range, put up miles of barbed wire, and will hang you for the most innocuous cattle rustling.

      But yes, the spam (aka bills and signs nailed up on every tree and fencepost) didn't help either.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    4. Re:Usenet as I knew it by bcrowell · · Score: 2

      Usenet was decaying slowly for years, but the big hit was in 2008 when Andrew Cuomo scored political points by getting ISPs to drop parts of the usenet hierarchy that he claimed were full of child pornography. What ended up happening was that ISPs just started dropping usenet service completely. A ton of people gave up on usenet at that point rather than pay a provider. You could use web interfaces, but they sucked. After that, I basically no longer could use usenet to communicate with the people I wanted to communicate with, because so many of them had left.

      --
      Find free books.
    5. Re:Usenet as I knew it by twistedcubic · · Score: 2


      From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations."

      This is not at all true. Ignorant people shouldn't make up shit.

    6. Re:Usenet as I knew it by jgrahn · · Score: 2

      From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations." This is not at all true. Ignorant people shouldn't make up shit.

      I can confirm that. In the 1991--1995 timeframe (which isn't at all early in Usenet's history), alt.* was like any other hierarchy, plus some really alternative groups like alt.suicide.holiday, alt.drugs.*, alt.fan.* and so on. There might have been some stuff in alt.binaries.* but back then it made more sense to bury the stuff in some obscure corner of your Uni FTP server.

      It wasn't until many years later I learned that some people saw Usenet as a big warez server. That still pisses me off -- it's destructive, like fishing with dynamite.

    7. Re:Usenet as I knew it by rs79 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Correct. I created alt.aquaria (indirectly) and alt.sex (indirectly) and comp.fonts and all the aquaria groups and alt.prose and christ knows what else.

      Brian Reid was my best friend on the net back then (and still is) and he created alt. It wasn't created for warez, it was created because Brian was pissed off his recipes group got turfed by Gene Spafford. John Gilmore wanted alt.drugs so they created those two groups, quietly snuck the into decwrl and the rest is history. alt.aquaria was the 7th alt group

      Henry Hardy wrote hos masters thesis on this. You can check for yourself online.

      --
      Need Mercedes parts ?
  5. Re:pourin' some bits out on the curb by LordLimecat · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yea, its so much better now that we got rid of all the porn, spam, and illegal stuff.

  6. Re:pourin' some bits out on the curb by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The internet never "used to be" like that, and USENET was never full of porn and spam, either. Believe it or not, there were people online before you ever got your first AOL floppy disk delivered to your house by junk mail.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  7. Re:Judges!=Techies by QuasiSteve · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You're right, judges aren't techies.

    That means that they look at the technical arguments the defendants put forth, examine them, say "nice try", and then agree with the rebuttal that these news server admins who take membership fees for their services which exists largely as the hosting and distribution of material for which they have no implicit or explicit permission to do so, know damn well that this is how their service is used and thus that their service operates on the boundaries of the law at best.
    The boundaries were just shifted, again.

    I'm guessing they'll appeal, though.

  8. Re:pourin' some bits out on the curb by lgw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Such a shame. Usenet was a tiny little holdout of what the internet used to be. Crazy, lawless, illegal, sometimes informative, and full of porn and spam

    That's called the "deep web" now: crazy, lawless, illegal, sometimes informative, and full of porn and spam. I wonder whether that will take off, or join freenet in the margins.

    --
    Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  9. Near-car analogy by airfoobar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Dear government. You provide the streets, therefore you are responsible for all crimes taking place on said streets. If you cannot stop all crimes on the streets you will face severe penalties.

    Therefore, I conclude that this is fucking stupid.

  10. Awww dammit! by squidflakes · · Score: 2

    Ok, fess up you guys. Who told the government about USENET?

  11. NNTP doesn't have cancels by Obfuscant · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The "cancel" doesn't exist in the NNTP protocol. NNTP is a protocol for transporting news articles, one of which may be a cancel control message as defined in USEFOR and USEPRO.

    The answer to why server admins don't honor cancel control messages is simple: they are routinely and regularly abused and honoring them would make USENET unusable.

    This decision will be the death knell for USENET. Making server admins responsible for monitoring content will get them to turn it off.

  12. judge by Tom · · Score: 2

    Why didn't the judge honor the 'cancel message' procedure that technically exists in the NNTP protocol?"

    Because that's implementation details that the judge doesn't and shouldn't care about. If they want to remove the content that way, he'll decide whether or not that's good enough to count as compliance. But the job of the judge is to decide what should be done, not how.

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  13. Re:NSE stores the messages. thats why. by uigrad_2000 · · Score: 2

    Because News Service Europe stores the infringing posts and makes them available. The judge has to honor the law and the company has to follow it not some self appointed RFC "cancel" procedure that may or may not work. Why is it that whenever a downloader gets cought people say: go for the hosters, when a hoster gets cought go for the provider when a provider ....

    An enormous FAQ on RFC cancel, cancel bots, forged cancels, cancel wars, etc. can be found here:
    http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/

    Unfortunately, the ability to cancel someone else's post is just too much power, so that privilege is not freely given out. Chances are, this hoster has probably turned it off. Maybe just turning it back on would be considered "following the judges orders", but it would open a lot of new problems.

    A better way to fight this is using Mere Conduit, which is similar to the Safe Harbor provisions we have in the DMCA.

    --
    Free unix account: freeshell.org
  14. You'd like to believe it was intent... by lpq · · Score: 2

    While searching for some foreign music, I ran into a 'catchall' on Google...

    They'd gotten a take-down notice for including search results about licensed anime, on blog and database sites -- that included no downloads or links to downloads...

    Now we are talking not just going after linkers, but linkers to people who even talk about the content.

    The takedown notice to google (to block search results -- freedom of speech),
          shows the list of sites I first ran into...then I ran into a real hilarious one --

    one against TWITTER -- and multiple 'twitters' that were deemed
    infringing content!! Like I be they were distributing movies 140 bytes
    at a time!

    Yeah...must be some serious 'intent' going on here...

    Oh yeah...lest I forget...the takedowns against Music Blogs almost 12,000/month -- musta been writing about the lyrics...

    Yeah, right...

    For every 'pirate' out there, there, there are 10-100 corporate pirates stealing the rights of the rest of us...