Those of you who are on the site, what are your thoughts on this? Is this the end of Newzbin?

In case you can't log in and view the Site News they've been posting...


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Quote :

"20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd - Day 4 A refreshed Caesium finished cross examination today. There have been/are huge procedural complications caused by Newzbin's internal issues and this may cause delays in the case being concluded this week. It would be fair to say that the picture painted in court of Newzbin has not been an entirely positive one. Whilst it is hard to double guess Mr Justice Kitchin, Newzbin may have some difficulties in the near future. Caesium was accused of lying massively and repeatedly under oath and 'concocting' a phoney defence: 'Bollocks' we said, a technical latin legal expression, but nonetheless a problematic accusation. We may be being paranoid, but at the moment our hunch is that things are looking less positive for us than last week. We hope we are wrong. Newzbin Legal [for clarification 'internal issues' does not refer to dissent within the company between people: everyone gets on just fine] 61 comments | create comment law @ 09-02-2010 00:07 GMT ----------------------------------- 20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd - Day 3 There have been bizarre side issues which have emerged. To be fair to the MPA (god, we never thought we'd ever say that!) it was out of their control and down to internal Newzbin issues. 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. Quite what happens next week when the trial restarts is unclear and there may be more delays. Times are getting interesting: in a Chinese sense. Newzbin Legal 72 comments | create comment law @ 06-02-2010 09:50 GMT --------------------- 20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd - Day 2 Today's update is very brief - cross examination of the MPA's witnesses has now finished. Questioning of Newzbin witnesses has started; Freaky first followed by Caesium. We can't say any more at this time due to witness rules. More information hopefully tomorrow. (comments locked on this one, sorry, we need to focus on other things than comment moderation today) No comments | comments locked Caesium @ 02-02-2010 19:05 GMT --------------------------------------------------- 20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd - Day 1 First day kicked off at 10:30am with the opposing barrister delivering his opening speech, which lasted about 3 hours. Apart from mostly being full of how evil we are, he explained, mostly for the Judge, Justice Kitchin, what Usenet is, what Newzbin is, what NZB files are, how they compare to hyperlinks [at great pains to try and convince him they are technically different], some accusations about our header fetching backend code [it's apparently designed to go looking for copyrighted stuff on Usenet specifically]. Our opening argument was blissfully short by comparison and stated only that we dispute nearly everything they say and we'll cover it in the evidence to come. The second part of the day consisted of witnesses for the claimants, which for the most part were pretty insignificant - a couple of FACT agents who didn't have much to say under cross-examination apart from they did a half-assed job analysing our site.. Some junior lawyers who confirmed they had harvested data from our listings but didn't bother to check how much of it was actually under any form of copyright. Their star of the show, an expert witness was cross-examined for the last hour, covering topics including the dangers of auto-opening NZB files [he admitted a malicious NZB file might be a virus and auto-opening it in a browser could lead to a user being infected by a virus], discussing the various reasons that binary headers and text-digest headers are treated separately in the backend [performance reasons, and they're handled differently until repors are created at the final step, at which point the two types of reports converge into one common database again]. Thankfully the Judge Justice Kitchin is remarkably on the ball and switched on - if nothing else this will be a very fair trial and already the opposing barrister has been pulled up on several points of contention - this Judge certainly won't blindly eat everything he's told by the MPA. on the other hand it doesn't mean he'll accept our arguments easily either. Court adjourned at 4:30pm. The trial continues.. Please note this news item has moderated comments, so your comment may take longer to appear than usual. ___________________________________________________ "

Thoughts?

2/9/2010 12:03:25 PM

shallow and pedantic

2/9/2010 12:09:50 PM

NDAs love em or hate em?

2/9/2010 1:25:06 PM

They seemed to have a really positive outlook on things in the beginning, but it's starting to look like the case may have taken a turn for the worse...

2/9/2010 4:37:46 PM

I wasn't aware of this case, can anyone provide some context?

2/9/2010 5:30:53 PM

It's a civil case, basically because the NZBs are created manually, some of those being of copyrighted material, they are saying that it's different from just automatically indexing like Google does. There is a lot more educated discussion about it elsewhere, just Google it.

2/9/2010 6:08:39 PM

Quote :

"Regretably we have lost the case. The MPA got a finding in their favour although the wide injunction they sought was denied to them. Our press release: " 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 just infringing material. Any of the material we index can be found on any one of 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, they 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 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 to continue to provide innovation and useful search resources 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. " We will have more to say when we have digested the case and we shall put up a legal page with more details in due course. The judgement can be seen on the Bailii site: http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2010/608.html&query=newzbin&method=boolean"

3/30/2010 3:44:35 AM

just startup your own index db... i started probably about the time that all the newzbin crap started to come down. its obvious that they will not be around at least in their current form for much longer.

so go install either flavor of SQL server (MS or MySQL) and then go download "Newsman Pro".

add all your favorite groups into a workgroup, I recommend one group per workgroup for performance reasons. then start to import all the headers you want to save. NMP has the ability to schedule updating of the headers on all or some of the groups you choose.

i personally have a system that I am running MS SQL Server Ent. on, and a raid setup for storage... you will need 1TB+ of space and 24-36GB of memory to do this right and easy.

if you invest the time to do this you will really like your results from being able to write your own SQL queries to search for content of your liking. then if you want, write a little .net app that will do these queries against your server and save the headers and related parts to a NZB formatted file, next and finally let SABNZBD do its dirty deeds for you :-)

enjoy

3/30/2010 4:16:30 PM

I use supersearch or nzbmatrix.com. I love NZBmatrix. Don't have to deal with filtering through all the crap.

3/30/2010 4:44:41 PM

http://deepsharer.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/newzbin-gossip/

5/18/2010 7:10:27 PM

NZBMatrix appears down to me, so at the moment I'm back on Newzbin for the first time since it reopened as Newzbin2... Anyone else who was/is a member reluctant to download their nzb's from Newzbin at this point?

7/12/2010 7:41:47 PM

Why would you be afraid to download an NZB? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of.

7/12/2010 8:21:32 PM