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Copyright Demands Push Largest European Usenet Provider Permanently Offline
First time accepted submitter jonathan1979 writes "Dutch anti-piracy authority BREIN has caused the largest European usenet provider, News-Service.com, to immediately terminate its services as they felt they could not live up to the court order served earlier."
It always surprises me how much power Brein has. Brein isn't mandated by anyone. It's not "the" authority, it's a self proclaimed authority. They don't work for the government, it's a foundation.
Let's admit it, nowadays Usenet is just another warez distribution network.
Except for a few diehard nerds everyone switched to online forums long ago.
Usenet has always been a Warez distribution network. Now however, it's 99% viruses disguised as warez.
If USENET were what it used to be, I would be sad about this. But it's just a scheme for companies like this to charge access to pirated goods while claiming that the responsibility lies elsewhere. If people still had useful discussions, I would feel differently but all that's left is the pirated materials.
Fast forward a little more, and the Death Star is destroyed, and a few sequels later, the Empire loses the war. Your point was?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In the US, the BSA is the same way ... its a pseudo-legal extortion outfit.
Of course, that's the norm in the US for a lot of organizations. The "Better Business Bureau" is another classic example. Commercial extortion was an area Yelp was trying to get into for a long time, too.
They work only if you can get enough customers to join in to have a serious impact. Despite the constant claims of hollywood that internet piracy is killing their industry, they are still churning out a series of blockbusters every year that rake in the cash with ease.
No they don't and here is why: You manage to get enough people to boycott (not easy since their goals are now the complete control of the channels so you can't hear or see anything but pre-packaged crap) to seriously hurt their bottom line and what will happen?
They will blame their losses on piracy, walk into the halls of power with a nice PPT that shows conclusively that "If we made X that year than logically we should have made X+Y by now so it HAS to be the pirates!" and then after handing out the customary bribes they WILL get ever more draconian laws and copyright extensions!
You see this is like "too big to fail' which is "heads I win, tails you lose" as they have long since figured out how to game the system so ANY action results in increased power and profits for them! Hell if you were to cause enough damage they'd just have a "piracy tax" added to every single HDD, flash drive, anything that can hold a scrap of data, and pick the money straight out of your pockets!
You have to give them credit, its a great scam. there is literally not a single answer you can give that won't give them more money and power! You copy their content you're a pirate, you don't copy but don't buy you're a pirate, you don't copy and DO buy you're not giving them the year over year gains their PPT says they should be so you must be a pirate! It is like xkcd only every road leads to " we get more money and/or power" for the megacorps. like I said, pretty slick scam.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sad as it may be, this was probably inevitable. I was pretty active on Usenet back in the day (1990s), and look back on that time with a fair bit of nostalgia; but I don't use it any more. Technology has moved on, and Usenet is an anachronism. The last couple of times I poked my nose into the groups I used to frequent, they were full of spam with very little (if any) worthwhile discussion taking place. The poor S/N ratio makes it pretty much unusable.
Usenet's primary purpose these days seems to be the distribution of spam and illicit copyrighted content. I've wondered how long it would be able to continue flying "under the radar" when many of the other popular file sharing services were getting hammered by the **AA and their henchmen.
While Usenet is essentially a distributed system, users still require an upstream provider, and these providers are quite vulnerable to legal pressure. It looks like Usenet's day of reckoning may be at hand; the incoming asteroid is on a collision course.
RIP Usenet.
I'll fetch him. BREIN? Huh. I can get RIAA! We'll have a nightmare with MPAA, have a surprise party for SCO, Monsanto can do the catering, and then we'll have christening for Lodsys! All I have to do is snap my fingers and they'll be here. They're lining up to get here, and do you know why Jack? Should I tell you why? Hmm? Because here, in this world, the bad guys can win!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
where ya gonna find out about a torrent in the first place
Trackers are decentralized in BitTorrent with DHT. Both trackers and search are decentralized in eMule's protocol.
That, however, should not be twisted into an excuse to keep the same bad practices. If it's clear that we can do better, then we should.
I would say that as little as possible, and bleeding to death by having the neck slashed sounds very painful.
Long term I hope for it to be eliminated entirely, by switching by growing the meat itself. Some progress already has been made in that direction.
Funny how hunting is not banned:
http://southholland.angloinfo.com/countries/holland/hunting.asp
Have you ever shot a living thing? It is not exactly a pain-free way to kill an animal, and I can assure you that hunted meat is not up to the hygiene standards of halal, kosher, or industrial slaughter. I seriously doubt that bans on kosher or halal meat are about health more than about making life hard for Jews and especially Muslims (given what I know of the politics of Holland and that fact that observant Muslims will eat kosher meat if halal meat is unavailable). I would accept the health argument if rather than ban the meat, they government simply refused to certify its safety (but still left open the option of buying it).
Palm trees and 8