UK Court: MPAA Not Entitled To Profits From Piracy 159
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the not-so-fast dept.
from the not-so-fast dept.
jfruh writes "The MPAA and other entertainment industry groups have been locked for years in a legal struggle against Newzbin2, a Usenet-indexing site. Since Newzbin2 profited from making it easier for users to find pirated movies online, the MPAA contends they can sue to take those profits on behalf of members who produced that content in the first place. But a British court has rejected that argument."
Apparently running Newzbin gave a good lifestyle (Score:3, Informative)
I assume that would be a McLaren F1, cost 0.5M pounds when new, now worth significantly more.
Re:Took me a second to see the logic... (Score:5, Informative)
The US Supreme Court ruled that copyright infringement IS NOT THEFT.
It's more like breach of contract, in a sense.
Or as the Supreme Court essentially put it - copyright violation is exactly like copyright violation.
Re:Dear MPAA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Asphalt Manufacturers Too! (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite. Newz2bin pretty much just archived binaries that were posted to usenet. They may knowingly have done this, (hell that's the only incentive to use usenet at all after spam destroyed it from being useful for anything else.) But the piracy scene on usenet is mostly old-school. The actual distribution system for pirated material is more like
Pirate (ripper) -> IRC -> Bittorrent -> Usenet