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."

Comments

power

[Nembi]

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.

Re:power

[nepka]

BREIN didn't have any power, courts did. And they went there and got results, just like you do in a civilized country.

Re:power

[Anonymous Coward]

And then they will be China's lapdogs...

Oh shit, does this mean that they're going to eat us then?

Re:power

[rtfa-troll]

This power is not coming from Brein themselves. This is based on a court decision. Simply put they have managed to persuade the court that the law is on their side and the law and copyright legislation is providing the power needed.

This is obviously an extreme restraint on freedom of speech. The Usenet data is widely and simply available. There is no way to provide an open communication service whilst guaranteeing that nobody using it puts up copyrighted material. On the other hand there are simple technical measures that BREIN could take, such as providing cancels for all of the posts that they claim copyright over and there are simple legal measures they could take to make using those measures reasonable such as guaranteeing to take over the legal liability of the Usenet providers for any mistakes BREIN make (including libel compensation for anyone who's post they incorrectly cancel). The only reason BREIN doesn't want to do this is that they do not want to take on the costs which their demands would cause. The law should tell the court to tell them to stuff off.

The only solution to this is political. Even if the appeal succeeds the very fact that this judgement could happen at all is going to chill free speech. I hope nobody from the Netherlands will be posting here complaining if they haven't already at least sent a message to their Members of Parliament.

Re:power

[nepka]

It's not a free speech matter. Just take a look at Binverse and Usenext sites. All they do is advertise download speeds, binaries, "user uploaded content" and blazing fast downloads. It's clear to everyone what files those are and what users will be looking for. Sadly, that is the state of Usenet now. It's just warez. You would had have a good point in the 90's, but now it's just a scheme from Usenet companies to profit from such material. They know that without warez they would not have subscribers.

Re:power

[nepka]

Oh and just as a note, they could still just carry all the other groups. In fact they could carry all groups, but just block binaries. They already have that system in place as they save text posts longer than binaries. This would satisfy BREIN's wishes. Of course, Usenet providers know that they will lose all their pirating customers if they did that, so they decided to just wrap it up and go home (after a good long profitable run).

Re:power

[Hentes]

If they prosecuted the ones uploading the content, thus committing the crime, you would be right. But holding storage/service providers liable is an attack against free communication.

Re:power

[SuricouRaven]

There is no difference between text and binaries to usenet - binaries are just yencoded as text. It's only a convention that binaries be posted in the alt.binaries groups. If those groups were closed down, you'd see binaries appear in the discussion groups.

Re:power

[Arlet]

It's relatively easy to block binaries in the discussion groups, though.

Re:power

[houghi]

There is no difference between text and binaries to usenet - binaries are just yencoded as text.

So there IS a difference.
So it would be easy to detect and thus blocked. Also many groups do not want binaries in their groups and users have been known to get removed.

Does this mean there will never ever be somone posting illegal material? No, it would not.

Re:power

[blackest_k]

The Netherlands seems to have changed from peaceful easy going to extremely right ring.
From banning products to banning religious practices.

Hal-ah and Kosher meat is soon to be banned from production in the Netherlands, which seems very much an attack on the Muslim and Jewish communities. Strangely importing of frozen Hal-ah meat is not an issue. Hal-ah meat is of extremely high quality due to the stringent rules of what is fit to be eaten and you don't need to be Jewish or Muslim to appreciate that.

It's such a far cry from the freedom loving Dutch people who were the most welcoming and friendly that you would find in Europe. Sad to see the about turn

Re:power

[Luckyo]

Halal meat isn't higher quality - it's usually lower quality in the West. The myth of it being "higher quality" comes from dark ages, when slaughtering animal without letting the blood drain out of it would cause blood remaining in the body to spoil extremely quickly (as blood is a very fertile soil for bacteria growth). Halal meat, while considered religious was actually started as a tradition for more healthy way of draining blood from the animal to get meat that was healthier to eat due to lower bacterial content.

Thing is, modern slaughtering techniques extract blood much more efficiently then slitting animal's throat and letting it drain while its heart still beats. As a result, just like halal meat being better quality then dark ages western meat, it's worse quality then modern industrially slaughtered meat. If you hear otherwise, know that you're talking to uninformed person or a liar with a (religious) axe to grind.

It's sad how USENET has changed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's sad how USENET has changed

[misexistentialist]

Why aren't you blaming the hard drive companies? Everything was better when people only had 1.44 MB of storage!

Re:It's sad how USENET has changed

[dkf]

If people still had useful discussions, I would feel differently but all that's left is the pirated materials.

You were subscribed to the wrong groups. There are still useful ones out there, with ordinary discussions happening just as they used to a decade or more ago.

Sort of like the BSA

[tgd]

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.

Re:Sort of like the BSA

[mcgrew]

Despite their best efforts, the BSA promotes open-source software.

In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for $65,000, plus $35,000 in legal fees. But by then, the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor their software licenses.

Humiliated by the experience, Ball told his IT department he wanted Microsoft products out of his business within six months. "I said, 'I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,'" recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. "We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly."

Ball's IT crew settled on a potpourri of open-source software--Red Hat's version of Linux, the OpenOffice office suite, Mozilla's Web browser--plus a few proprietary applications that couldn't be duplicated by open source. Ball, whose father, Ernie, founded the company, says the transition was a breeze, and since then he's been happy to extol the virtues of open-source software to anyone who asks. He spoke with CNET News.com about his experience.

Re:The only way to win.

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Re:The only way to win.

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:Usenet is a dinosaur

[turbidostato]

"Technology has moved on, and Usenet is an anachronism."

So, please, can you explain to me what's the better technology that arose that made NNTP an anachronism? Because I honestly say I don't know the current technology that is better than NNTP doing its stuff on technical grounds.

Re:Usenet is a dinosaur

[marcello_dl]

> Technology has moved on, and Usenet is an anachronism.

As a distributed content provider subdivided by categories, usenet was better than most centralized systems we have today. It doesn't matter if they are implemented in the cloud: if fb throws you out, who cares how many redundant servers they have.

Usenet did leave people with too much freedom, so alternatives who removed such control creeped in. Now we are at the stage of megaupload and company that is replacing bittorrent that is replacing p2p. See an involution? You become the dumb terminal again.