20th Century fox vs Newzbin

I don't think they'll be able to argue this on a few newz site though.

Newzbin only got ****ed cause it charges.
 
I don't get it? They don't directly contribute to copyright theft, but facilitate it by linking? Correct? So who's next, Google? Yahoo? Bing? I can get tonnes of copyrighted material through google and without paying for said service aswell!

Ridiculous.
 
Why don't these film/music/TV companies get an online service going. I would happily pay £10 a month for a few TV shows I watch.

I have Sky but never watch it as I hate being tied to a time I have to watch it, also Sky Plus is restricted, I can't backup my recordings.
 
Sad news, but rather inevitable. Judgment in full, and Newzbin press release:

Newzbin said:
We are very disappointed with the judgment. Regrettably the court has accepted the distorted and flawed evidence that Hollywood presented. Contrary to the finding of the court our site has not deliberately sought to index infringing material, nor to assist those of our users who use it for that purpose. The site provides a generalised search facility for binary content found on Usenet and not infringing material. Any of the material we index can be found on any one of a thousands of sites on the Internet so pursuit of us is a futile waste of everyones time and money.

Sadly the MPA are stuck in a technology stone age. Rather than addressing their own broken business models & monopolistic commercial practices they seek to curtail innovation and freedom on the Internet. It is notable, for example, that the MPA are the sponsors behind attempts to introduce Chinese internet censorship into the UK through the Digital Enterprise Bill. Perhaps if they used their energy providing what people want rather than buying laws to sustain their own house of cards their might have a stronger future. We certainly reject their attempt to use this decision and our site as an excuse for rushing through undemocratic laws in a wash-up just before an election.

We have lacked the limitless legal funds and legions of lawyers the MPA had and that is the only reason for their win. That said we are looking at our grounds of appeal and how we move forward and continue to provide innovation and search for our users.

Ultimately the dinosaurs of the content industry will need to face reality; the sad thing is that winning cases such as this only damages them and puts their own future in doubt.
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They can cut off the arm of the 'piracy' starfish but alas, another only grows back and there are still many others in the meantime.
 
tbh it will be five mins before a new one pops up to replace it..........

oh wait! they already have!

as with oink, take one down and you just end up with three better hidden ones.
sadly this did not go the same way as that case.
 
Chris1712 said:
So are they going to shutdown newzbin, or just gimp the hell out of it?
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The latter, if earlier updates are to be believed. Time will tell, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter. Half way through reading the entire judgment now, and I was fairly surprised at their turnover - though in a way shocked it wasn't more really lol
 
We download here, and if we like it, or its a favourite band, we then purchase the album/DVD/Blu Ray legally. Sort of a "try before you buy" scenario.

The studios have a point, as do Newzbin. The only sensible way to resolve the issue is buy setting reasonable prices in both the shops, and the internet. I saw someone suggest earlier

25p a song
£1 an episode
£2.50 a film.

I would totally agree to that provided: -

1. A HQ bitrates for songs, and HD for episodes and movies.
2. I can move songs/episodes/movies between devices
3. I can make a back up, or can download again in the event of data loss without having to pay an extended downlaod fee.
4. Very fast download speeds to get the HQ data.

This model could work.
 
benk said:
We download here, and if we like it, or its a favourite band, we then purchase the album legally. Sort of a "try before you buy" scenario.

The studios have a point, as do Newzbin. The only sensible way to resolve the issue is buy setting reasonable prices in both the shops, and the internet. I saw someone suggest earlier

25p a song
£1 an episode
£2.50 a film.

I would totally agree to that provided: -

1. A HQ bitrates for songs, and HD for episodes and movies.
2. I can move songs/episodes/movies between devices
3. I can make a back up, or can download again in the event of data loss without having to pay an extended downlaod fee.
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All that with no proprietary software or bloatware, or forced adverts and I'd be in.
 
i'm not entirely clued up on what's happening here and from what i read it sounds as though newzbin has lost due to not having the money to pay for the legal team required, but surely google are fine as they are a company that provides a search engine, they link to all things and everything, you get the good, but also a small amount of bad being linked to is to be expected, however newzbin is pretty much only used for illegal downloading?
 
Locky said:
So when is google and Co being shut down then?
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Google is a bit different. It's just an automated computer algorithm which scours the web.

Newsbin is a dedicated piracy community whose sole purpose is to share links to the latest copyrighted material on usenet.

I do think it's unfair as it's not really going to help the MPAA. Their films are still stored on the hundreds of usenet servers world-wide, rendering this court case completely pointless.
 
Mammalian said:
i'm not entirely clued up on what's happening here and from what i read it sounds as though newzbin has lost due to not having the money to pay for the legal team required, but surely google are fine as they are a company that provides a search engine, they link to all things and everything, you get the good, but also a small amount of bad being linked to is to be expected, however newzbin is pretty much only used for illegal downloading?
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tbh newzbin is like google but ONLY did one thing (this is called a vertical search engine, in this case files on newsgroups) rather than everything they can get their mits on.
 
Have you guys read the judgement? I just had a flick through, I'm not surprised they lost to be honest.

Judgement is here: http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/marku...Ch/2010/608.html&query=newzbin&method=boolean

A few high/low lights

# That same month, Mr Elsworth was asked if there was a way to search inside NFO files because "on a lot of movies the NFO file contains who stars in the movie or a full description of it". Mr Elsworth responded that there was no such facility at the moment, but there "could be if there was enough demand for it". The explanation he provided under cross examination for this interchange was, in my judgment, simply not credible (Day 2 at 145):

"Q. So what this person is envisaging is searching under a movie star?

A. He's envisioning searching on anybody who may be in a video file, yes.

Q. Well, a movie star; who stars in it, "who stars in the movie".

A. That's the wording he uses, yes.

Q. He's talking about searching for a movie star?

A. That's not necessarily true.

Q. What else does it mean?

A. You can star in a home video.

Q. An NFO file contains who stars in the movie. Are you suggesting that what he might have in mind is some unknown ten year old, say, starring in the movie which has been filmed on a camcorder by their parents?

A. I'm suggesting that "movie" is a very broad definition of a video, and "starring" and you can star in any sort of video, not just a commercially released video.

Q. Of course, what we're envisaging here is people who are third parties to the video or the movie searching for it. So the unknown person who is starring in a movie, they are not going to be known, so you won't know the name to search for, will you?

A. It depends if you are a friend or family of the star of the home video.

Q. They'll give it to you then; you won't be searching on Newzbin for it, will you?

A. Perhaps.

Q. It's quite plain that what this person has in mind is a facility which will enable him, because he has favourite movie stars, to acquire movies in that way, using your site, is it not?

A. I don't agree with that, no."
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It was the defendant's case, maintained by Mr Elsworth in his evidence, that only an insignificant fraction of the defendant's database relates to infringing content. I am satisfied this is quite wrong and I reject both the defendant's case and Mr Elsworth's evidence. On 16 December 2009, Mr Clark, assisted by trainee solicitors in the firm of solicitors acting for the claimants, carried out an analysis of a sample of the reports entered in the Newzbin index under the Movies category. About 50,000 reports were analysed. 97.5% had a valid link to the IMDb site, 0.7% had a valid link to Amazon and a further 1.5% were shown to be commercially available upon further investigation. Only 0.3% were not shown to be commercially available. In my judgment this analysis is extremely powerful. It shows that, in practice, the overwhelming majority of the reports in the Movies category of the Newzbin index relate to content which is commercial and very likely to be protected by copyright.
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# I am satisfied that Mr Elsworth well knew that these categories were primarily intended for new commercial films. The position was confirmed a little later when Mr Elsworth was asked about a post in January 2007 in these terms: "looks like were going to need Blu-Ray attributes as Blu-Ray has been cracked officially". Mr Elsworth accepted that he suspected that it meant that a way to make a copy of a Blu-Ray had been developed and then the following interchange took place (on Day 2 at 134):

"Q. Yes. And you need a category for Blu Ray, or we need a category for Blu Ray, because Blu Ray has been cracked so now people will be copying movies off of Blu Ray so you need to deal with those. That's what this post means, doesn't it?

A. That does look like what that post means, yes.

Q. So that person has copyright infringement in mind?

A. No, I would not say that person had copyright infringement in mind. I would say that person looks like he just wants to report Blu Rays. He cites a reason for adding the Blu Ray category as they are being cracked but he does not cite a specific intention to report copyrighted Blu Rays.

Q. Well, what else would it be?

A. I don't know.

Q. Why would it be Blu Rays that would need cracking?

A. I don't know.

Q. You can't come up with any explanation other than a copyright-protected commercial movie, can you?

A. No."
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If you look at the news reports on newzbin its clear one of the directors (Mr Elsworth) became very distressed at some point while giving his evidence.

Combined with Caesium falling ill during cross-examination by the opposing barrister, this has caused a delay and things are a bit of a shambles at the moment.
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Seems like the prosecution had a good team of lawyers which you would expect with the resources they no doubt have. Sounds like they ripped him to pieces to the point of him falling ill.
 
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