A lot of things happening on the Usenet scene in the UK, as one sites gets blocked, while another takes itself down due to legal threats.
Back in July, British ISP BT was ordered by the court to use its child-porn filters to block Usenet indexing site Newzbin2, despite the new version of the original Newzbin no longer operating within the British Isles. This week, two parties involved in the case, BT and the MPA (the International arm of the MPAA) settled on the details of the court order, which basically means BT has 14 days to block access to Newzbin2 by its subscribers.
Newzbin2's operators say that already have ways to allow users to bypass BT's block, and so the effectiveness of the court order is suspect.
But another Usenet indexer, NZBsRus, has been taken down this past Friday as well in an unrelated incident. The owners of NZBsRus took the decision to take down the website after receiving a cease and desist notice from FACT, the Federation Against Copyright Theft, a UK based group that is heavily associated with the MPAA.
Unlike sites of a similar nature, NZBsRus was run quite openly, without any real attempt to be hosted on a "friendly" ISP, or to hide the identify of the operators, as the new operators of Newzbin2 has done.
The owners of NZBsRus say that no download logs has been kept, and that other private user information is safe. For now.
Home
