Hollywood Forces BT To Block Newzbin 2 site

[nsane.forums]

Following a hearing in London's High Court, leading UK ISP BT will be forced to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2. Under the banner of the MPA, the leading Hollywood studios successfully argued that by letting the site continue unabated their interests would be severely damaged. The decision, the first of its kind in the UK, increases the pressure on other ISPs.

As previously reported, UK ISP BT has been facing off against the major Hollywood movie studios in the High Court. The Motion Picture Association wanted an injunction ordering BT to block its subscribers from accessing Newzbin2, a site it claims causes the industry significant losses due to unlawful movie downloading.

Today a High Court judge ruled in the MPA's favor and ordered BT to block Newzbin2.

"In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the Studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes," said Justice Arnold in his ruling.

"It knows that the users of Newzbin2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin2."

Despite earlier an statement which indicated that Newzbin2′s owners would hire lawyers to fight attempts to have them blocked in the UK, the site has not been represented during the hearings.

BT described the judgment as "helpful" since it provides clarity on a "complex issue".

"It clearly shows that rights holders need to prove their claims and convince a judge to make a court order. BT has consistently said that rights holders need to take this route. We will return to court after the summer to explain what kind of order we believe is appropriate," the ISP said in a statement.

Newzbin2 carries no illicit content of its own, but provides so-called "structural access" to content uploaded by others to the worldwide newsgroup (Usenet) system. Features offered by the members-only subscription site include a raw search, which is very similar to any other Internet search engine and is entirely legal.

The thorn in the MPA's side, however, is the site's supply of NZBs. These are torrent-like files which often link to named illicit content. These NZBs, which make otherwise complicated Usenet downloading a breeze, are organized by Newzbin2′s editors into categories such as CAM, Screener, Telesync, R5 and Workprint, titles which leave little to the imagination when it comes to considering the legitimacy of their sources.

Both MPA and BT will be back in court during October to decide on the practicalities of carrying out the injunction.

Now that the MPA has been successful in this website-blocking bid, there are concerns that this phenomenon will spread to other targets. Initially other ISPs in the UK will be expected to follow suit and block Newzbin2 too, a development confirmed by the MPA this morning.

View: Original Article

[avmad]

BT ordered to block links to Newzbin 2 website

A High Court judge has ruled that BT must block access to a website which provides links to pirated movies.

Newzbin 2 is a members-only site which aggregates a large amount of the illegally copied material found on Usenet discussion forums.

The landmark case is the first time that an ISP has been ordered to block access to such a site.

It paves the way for other sites to be blocked as part of a major crackdown on piracy.

Source BBC News article

[DKT27]

Staff Note: Threads merged. ;)

[marke68]

Can't say i'm particularly bothered about this tbh as given what a piss poor country the uk has become,it comes as no surprise that we've been bent over and royally screwed by hollywood and there minions.

My personal answer to this is to go on a good old fashioned download frenzy and grab all those 50 gig blurays i've been after on Usenet while sticking my middle finger in the air at all the greedy corporates in hollywood.

You can block our sites but you cant stop us downloading your precious movies....Arghh jim lad hoist the main brace and set sail for nzbland.

[DKT27]

Newzbin2 Respond Angrily To High Court Blocking Injunction

As reported this morning, Justice Arnold in London's High Court has ordered leading UK ISP BT to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2.

Needless to say, the admins at Newzbin2 aren't particularly impressed out the outcome. Here is their response to the ruling in full – and uncensored.

An infamous day in the UK

We have an astonishing result in the UK court case of MPA v the Internet (aka 20th Century Fox v BT): the MPA wins. We were only more surprised to hear that Liberace was a piano player.

Despite being an entirely different crew from Newzbin1 (as we stressed in our earlier press release) we have, it seems, 'inherited' their legal liability for copyright infringement. In the previous case liability arose only because of the conduct of the Newzbin1 crew and what Caesium and his guys did. The judge then went on to say we 'moved' offshore. We are a new group and were never 'onshore'.

Arnold J listed a large number of features of the site which, while assisting those infringing copyright, aren't illegal under US or UK law without aggravating features not shown on the evidence here. He then went on to refer to a study by the MPA of content of Usenet showing most was infringing. On that basis he seemed to suggest that we must magically know this. We don't analyse Usenet content and we don't care. We index Usenet but we do not statistical analysis of the content: it's of no interest to us or our subscribers.

Good bits? One piece stood out:

The Studios relied on two recent studies of the scale of the problem so far as the film and television industries are concerned. A study by Ipsos MediaCAT dated April 2010 analysing the scale of film and television piracy in the UK in 2009 estimated the overall loss from film piracy at £477 million and the overall loss from television piracy at £58 million. A study by Tera Consultants dated March 2010 concluded that in 2008 the audio and audiovisual industries in the UK lost almost 670 million euros in revenues to physical and digital piracy, with the larger proportion of that lost revenue attributable to digital piracy.

i.e. the horse shit the MPA has been selling for years: pay a bunch of rent-a-study phonies to say what you want them to say and then parrot it as the objective & independent truth. But the judge was a little wilier on the topic:

21. I cannot ignore the analysis of Professor Ian Hargreaves in his recent report. … [estimated the losses from piracy ~ 1.24% of the contribution made by the core copyright industries to the UK economy]

I accept that online copyright infringement is a serious problem for copyright owners such as the Studios and the other rightholders who support this application, but in general it is one whose impact is difficult to quantify with any confidence. the measured impacts to date are not as stark as is sometimes suggested by the language used to describe them.

Yea, we agree: the MPA stats stink worse that Victoria Beckham's masturbation finger.

The worst thing about the whole judgement is that it is clear that other smaller ISPs will now be railroaded into web censorship. Nothing in the judgement will stop crooks & crackpots like the Scientologists censoring web content by the use of a 'Newzbin2 Injunction' (we predict it will be called that). Sue your defamer? Why bother with an expensive lengthy court case? Just get a Newzbin2 Order. No?:

Even if the present application succeeds, it does not automatically follow that applications in respect of such websites [e.g. defamatory/anorexia/whatever] would succeed.

Great, so there is a massive roadblock to free speech abuse. The free Internet in the UK just had a heart attack.

What of this humble blog being blocked?

Finally, I recognise that the order would potentially prevent BT subscribers from making use of Newzbin2 for non-infringing uses. On the evidence, however, the incidence of such uses is de minimis.

Nice. we don't consider our blog to be earth shattering literature to rival Graham Green, but our readers are entitled to hear our views and news: if by uncensoring 'blog.newzbin.com' from Cleanfeed that can happen it seems a tad disproportionate not to do so.

As for Cleanfeed web censorship the judge said:

18. the parties were agreed that it was undesirable for me to condescend to too much technical detail in a public judgment.

Bad news: We know how it works. Security through obscurity doesn't work. And after October neither will Cleanfeed.

View: Original Article

[avmad]

So what are they going to do after this? Block everything on the net that may point to or discuss anything illegal?

I find it shocking. I wonder if this ruling will be for any ISP that rents BT's lines or just BT in particular. Very odd lumping it into the child molesting category. There Cleanfeed will be in bits I'd imagine, and that could take some fixing lol.

I wonder which NZB sites next? I'd be a lot more peed off if I was with BT, but they do use BT lines.

Time to go look on my fav NZB site.

[marke68]

So what are they going to do after this? Block everything on the net that may point to or discuss anything illegal?

I find it shocking. I wonder if this ruling will be for any ISP that rents BT's lines or just BT in particular. Very odd lumping it into the child molesting category. There Cleanfeed will be in bits I'd imagine, and that could take some fixing lol.

I wonder which NZB sites next? I'd be a lot more peed off if I was with BT, but they do use BT lines.

Time to go look on my fav NZB site.

Hehehe and guess who just signed up with BT Infinity less than a month ago although i can't say i'm that bothered as they may be able to block newzbin which to be honest isn't half the site it used to be but they can't stop me downloading what i want so long as i dont download anything huge during peak hours.

If you need a heads up on decent nzb sites then let me know and i'll drop you a line rather than going public if you know what i mean. ^_^

[avmad]

Thanks, I stick with matrix, seems a whole lot better than anything else I've seen.

The forums seem to say don't worry about it, all you need is a VPN etc. Only time will tell.

[marke68]

Thanks, I stick with matrix, seems a whole lot better than anything else I've seen.

The forums seem to say don't worry about it, all you need is a VPN etc. Only time will tell.

Ok no problem mate,matrix is where i went when the original newsbin closed.