Dutch Usenet Provider Ordered To Remove Infringing Content 109
dutchwhizzman writes "Amsterdam-based Usenet wholesale provider News Service Europe has been mandated by a court to remove all copyright-infringing content on their servers, or face severe financial penalties. Dutch copyright organization BREIN has won a court case making the Usenet provider responsible for the content posted on platforms other than their own. Could this be the end of Usenet as we know it, or will an appeal be won by NSE? Why didn't the judge make the provider that allowed the posts responsible? Why didn't the judge honor the 'cancel message' procedure that technically exists in the NNTP protocol?"
usenet warez (Score:2)
While
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But it's not stopping for the handful of people still using NNTP for discussions.
I am curious as to how they will determine what is and is not copyright-infringing content.
Re:usenet warez (Score:5, Insightful)
I am curious as to how they will determine what is and is not copyright-infringing content.
By shutting down access to everything, obviously. There is no other possible way to do it because there is no automated way to determine who the copyright owner for a piece of text is or whether it was properly licensed.
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Just require the evil bit to be zero for legal content.
It should be easy enough to monitor that.
--
I think I just sprained my sarcasm tendon.
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And that's the problem, it's only a handful of users it seems. I was on there for ages even into this millenium. But the number of useful and usable groups diminished as more and more of them got taken over by spam. Once enough users have left it becomes pointless to try and have good discussions.
I liked the one-stop model of usenet; all forums were there from everywhere. Local classified ads up through high level discussion of what should be in technical standards. And an interface you could pick and
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Spammers destroyed usenet. Web forums and BBSs destroyed usenet.
"Leeches and warez" did no such thing. No one forces you to look into .bin.
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You'd like to believe it was intent... (Score:3)
While searching for some foreign music, I ran into a 'catchall' on Google...
They'd gotten a take-down notice for including search results about licensed anime, on blog and database sites -- that included no downloads or links to downloads...
Now we are talking not just going after linkers, but linkers to people who even talk about the content.
The takedown notice to google (to block search results -- freedom of speech) [chillingeffects.org],
shows the list of sites I first ran into...then I ran into a real hi
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I dont know what you're talking about... but I agree :P
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You aren't fooling anyone AC.
We all know that the REAL way you got good at using regular expressions was by bulk downloading alt.sex.binaries, then using ls, grep, and rm to automatically remove all the kiddie porn before the fbi became the porn police.
You only refuse to talk about it now out of fear of goons knocking in the door. ;)
pourin' some bits out on the curb (Score:1)
Such a shame. Usenet was a tiny little holdout of what the internet used to be. Crazy, lawless, illegal, sometimes informative, and full of porn and spam.
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Yea, its so much better now that we got rid of all the porn, spam, and illegal stuff.
Re:pourin' some bits out on the curb (Score:4, Insightful)
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I remember those!
I used to bulk send requests for trials, then use a roll of masking tape to cover the write protect hole. Free floppies!
It's a shame they stopped the practice after cds. Getting a bunch of usb sticks in the mail would make me feel like a kid again. :)
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I started using usenet around , maybe 93? Back when here in australia the only internet I could get was a crazy little BBS run by a couple of paraplegic guys turned ISP that boasted of its 128kb ISDN connection to the local university back when all internet in australia was run by the universities and they where starting to lease connections out to private providers. Getting TCP/IP to work properly with MS-DOS proved beyond my technical skills at the time and TCP/IP just didn't exist on my minix machine. Wh
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In 93 you could have installed KA9Q on your pc.
Re:pourin' some bits out on the curb (Score:5, Interesting)
Such a shame. Usenet was a tiny little holdout of what the internet used to be. Crazy, lawless, illegal, sometimes informative, and full of porn and spam
That's called the "deep web" now: crazy, lawless, illegal, sometimes informative, and full of porn and spam. I wonder whether that will take off, or join freenet in the margins.
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I have to disagree, as in the old days, it was *not* full of spam. Now, porn and lawlessness, that is another story ;)
At least there is still freenet. ( until draconian bandwidth caps effectively kill that off )
Judges!=Techies (Score:1)
Duh, Judges judge law, they don't know technical protocols and unless outlined and understood properly they are poorly equiped to issue judgements based on the information they receive by prosecutors and defense attorneys... imho :-)
Re:Judges!=Techies (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, judges aren't techies.
That means that they look at the technical arguments the defendants put forth, examine them, say "nice try", and then agree with the rebuttal that these news server admins who take membership fees for their services which exists largely as the hosting and distribution of material for which they have no implicit or explicit permission to do so, know damn well that this is how their service is used and thus that their service operates on the boundaries of the law at best.
The boundaries were just shifted, again.
I'm guessing they'll appeal, though.
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The courts have been bought and sold for a long time. As long as the rich and corporations can buy laws citizens are not obligated to obey them.
Usenet as I knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
Could this be the end of Usenet as we know it
Usenet as I knew it was a bulletin board system for worldwide discussion of all kinds of subjects under the sun, from politics to auto mechanics to cigars to, of course, Star Trek - For me it was never a place to download gigabytes of binaries of Fringe episodes. To me, SPAM killed usenet, not a binaries ban.
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For me it was more the 4chan like behavior, as usenet was totally unmoderated in many channels.
True, the endless barrage of penis enlargement and work at home ads didn't help any, the constant stream of "show me your boobs" type posts in totally inappropriate channels was a show stopper.
Eventually, all it was good for was downloading porn and pirate software.
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TITS or GTFO!
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Re:Usenet as I knew it (Score:4, Insightful)
Usenet has issues (I don't use it anymore either), but Usenet was the best-moderated discussion forum in the history of civilization. It was moderated by your NNTP client. When will web-based forums achieve that level of perfection?
Re:Usenet as I knew it (Score:4, Informative)
Register on eternal-september.org and it still can be. They dropped all .binaries forums and only host the primarily text based discussions, which allow them to mirror the majority of important usenet stuff for only a fraction of the bandwidth. Even better they have options to allow mirorring of their copies.
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You lived a very sheltered USENET life.
From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations."
The wild west was wild. Now the agribusiness farmers have moved in, platted the range, put up miles of barbed wire, and will hang you for the most innocuous cattle rustling.
But yes, the spam (aka bills and signs nailed up on every tree and fencepost) didn't help either.
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Yep.
Usenet was about 5 years before my time, but I still recall the days we thought the Net was the Great Frontier.
But now after spending Mega Billions, some 200 Corps plus 30 Governments hauled all of the net into a Big Brother nightmare.
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From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations."
This is not at all true. Ignorant people shouldn't make up shit.
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From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations." This is not at all true. Ignorant people shouldn't make up shit.
I can confirm that. In the 1991--1995 timeframe (which isn't at all early in Usenet's history), alt.* was like any other hierarchy, plus some really alternative groups like alt.suicide.holiday, alt.drugs.*, alt.fan.* and so on. There might have been some stuff in alt.binaries.* but back then it made more sense to bury the stuff in some obscure corner of your Uni FTP server.
It wasn't until many years later I learned that some people saw Usenet as a big warez server. That still pisses me off -- it's destruct
Re:Usenet as I knew it (Score:4, Interesting)
Correct. I created alt.aquaria (indirectly) and alt.sex (indirectly) and comp.fonts and all the aquaria groups and alt.prose and christ knows what else.
Brian Reid was my best friend on the net back then (and still is) and he created alt. It wasn't created for warez, it was created because Brian was pissed off his recipes group got turfed by Gene Spafford. John Gilmore wanted alt.drugs so they created those two groups, quietly snuck the into decwrl and the rest is history. alt.aquaria was the 7th alt group
Henry Hardy wrote hos masters thesis on this. You can check for yourself online.
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From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations."
No it wasn't, newbie. Get off my lawn.
alt.* was outside the offical hierarchy, but was still text discussion, not copyright infringement - check out the archives.
People used to post patches via usenet (Score:2)
There was a time when patches were distributed via usenet. I haven't touched it since technology shifted to web interfaces, subversion clients, etc.
But as far as I can recall, it was always rife with spam, offtopic posts, script kiddies, porn, and illegal binaries.
I won't mourn usenet any more than I mourn the kermit protocols.
Sad that another company's business is going the way of the dodo, but that's life.
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I first hit Usenet in 1984. The spam and crap were already there, sorry to say. People always have rose-coloured glasses when remembering "the good old days."
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It wasn't always rife with that stuff. Once the alt.* stuff showed up it became more popular, then after the awful day when AOL was unleashed it was worse. But you could still find alternate newsgroups. Ie, you might find a moderated group that paired with the unmoderated ones, and the technical groups weren't inundated with asshats. Over time it just deteriorated with spam. The only alternatives were BBSs which were pretty awful, or maybe compuserve.
Interesting note... When I was first out of school
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Usenet was decaying slowly for years, but the big hit was in 2008 when Andrew Cuomo scored political points by getting ISPs to drop parts of the usenet hierarchy that he claimed were full of child pornography. What ended up happening was that ISPs just started dropping usenet service completely. A ton of people gave up on usenet at that point rather than pay a provider. You could use web interfaces, but they sucked. After that, I basically no longer could use usenet to communicate with the people I wanted t
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Remember the good old days (Score:1)
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The link provided returns: You have asked Firefox to connect securely to torrentfreak.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown.
Tools (Score:1)
Near-car analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear government. You provide the streets, therefore you are responsible for all crimes taking place on said streets. If you cannot stop all crimes on the streets you will face severe penalties.
Therefore, I conclude that this is fucking stupid.
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Ah, but governments are special.
Besides which, although there is certainly crime that occurs which takes place on said streets, a far greater amount of non-crime takes place on those streets.
This cannot be said for the news servers in question.
In addition, the streets weren't created for the facilitation of said crimes.
While some news servers may have originally been set up purely for the discussions, the servers in question most certainly were not.
Finally (as far as this post goes), as alien as it may seem
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oh you silly anon.. you know very well I wasn't talking about Usenet as a technology. The discussion was regarding the service providers - such as News Service Europe - which most certainly are set up primarily for the aforementioned activities. As others have already pointed out, there are similar service providers that have dropped the binaries altogether - provided there isn't a shift in content location to the non-binaries groups, that should do just fine for the court order again News Service Europe.
Awww dammit! (Score:3)
Ok, fess up you guys. Who told the government about USENET?
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Some 12 year old AOLer back in 1990.
It just took this long for the court clerks to figure out how to use NNTP. You know how hard such new fangled technology is for them.
Just wait till they figure out facebook!
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/me too
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I wouldn't know.. I never actually *used* their pittiful service, and used a real ISP.
(I only took notice of aol when they started sending out reasonably high quality floppy disks with shitty software on them, which was closer to 94 or 95. Investing in a 1$ roll of masking tape could net you all the free floppies you could ask for. It was awsome.)
Besides, that wasn't the joke. The joke was that a butthurt netcopper whined about somebody calling his mom a whore, and only just now did the technologically chal
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The predecessor, Q-Link, did (1985). Q-Link then morphed into AOL in early 1991.
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Because News Service Europe stores the infringing posts and makes them available. The judge has to honor the law and the company has to follow it not some self appointed RFC "cancel" procedure that may or may not work. Why is it that whenever a downloader gets cought people say: go for the hosters, when a hoster gets cought go for the provider when a provider ....
An enormous FAQ on RFC cancel, cancel bots, forged cancels, cancel wars, etc. can be found here:
http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/ [killfile.org]
Unfortunately, the ability to cancel someone else's post is just too much power, so that privilege is not freely given out. Chances are, this hoster has probably turned it off. Maybe just turning it back on would be considered "following the judges orders", but it would open a lot of new problems.
A better way to fight this is using Mere Conduit [wikia.com], which is simi
SSL problem? (Score:2)
Is it me or is https://torrentfreak.com/major-usenet-provider-ordered-to-remove-all-infringing-content-110929/ [torrentfreak.com] untrusted? My Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.14 web browser says:
"torrentfreak.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed.
The certificate is not valid for any server names.
The certificate expired on 2/9/2011 6:43 AM.
(Error code: sec_error_expired_issuer_certificate)"
ELinks v0.12pre5 says "SSL Error".
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Even more curious, Safari shows the content, but does not show the lock icon in the corner of the window. Filed a bug.
At Least... (Score:1)
NNTP doesn't have cancels (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer to why server admins don't honor cancel control messages is simple: they are routinely and regularly abused and honoring them would make USENET unusable.
This decision will be the death knell for USENET. Making server admins responsible for monitoring content will get them to turn it off.
How do they know? (Score:2)
Kill the binaries groups so Usenet sucks less. (Score:2)
Snuff the binaries groups and improve Usenet. It will still be spammy though.
judge (Score:3)
Why didn't the judge honor the 'cancel message' procedure that technically exists in the NNTP protocol?"
Because that's implementation details that the judge doesn't and shouldn't care about. If they want to remove the content that way, he'll decide whether or not that's good enough to count as compliance. But the job of the judge is to decide what should be done, not how.
What is killing usenet is.... (Score:1)
database sites that generate NZB files. Makes it easier for the technologically illiterate to use it, therefore brings it onto the radar...
"Could this be the end of Usenet as we know it?" (Score:2)
Not in the USA: we have the DMCA "safe harbor" provisions.
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Yeah, tell that to my ISP that decided to get rid of it just because they don't want to risk taking a risk with a risk of risking risk with risk.. yadda yadda...
My provider's name is Time Warner.
The Dutch and Usenet binaries? Cry me a river (Score:1)
The Dutch were notorious for abusing Usenet binaries. They would post floods (ignoring upload limits in group rules, such as uploading whole TV seasons all at once), post off-topic binaries (such as US cartoons in anime groups), post passworded archive binaries, and worst of all, they had warez-exchange programs using Usenet as a file transfer protocol that meant they didn't have to care, much less know, what Usenet was. Basically, they used alt.binaries.* as their own personal file dump. And their news adm
Enlighten me. (Score:2)
The end? (Score:2)
Could this be the end of Usenet as we know it?
For those of us that were around before Usenet existed, and watched it overtake local dial-up BBSs i can assure you that Usenet effectively died a long time ago. The Usenet of today is just a obscure shadow of what it was at its height.
When you read into the details... (Score:2)
... the provider did offer a YouTube-type "if you tell us we'll remove it" deal but BREIN didn't want that. BREIN ultimately wanted to create a precedent where the owner of a service is solely responsible for finding out which content infringes on random copyright, remove it from their servers and from everybody else who downloaded it.
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If this were applied in general, search engines, video and blog sites, and anyone hosting a message board/forum would have to shut their sites down. It's stupid and shows a judge that hasn't got a clue how the Internet works. IF they should go after anyone, it should be the poster of the content not the service providers.
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Well, let's be honest... can you blame them?
Presume for a second that you're a content 'owner' in terms of having the sole distribution rights for that content.
You find such a site, and you find that your content is hosted on that site.
You realize the site has such a "if you tell us we'll remove it" option, but it comes with a long list of provisions which you have to fulfill, and the document has to be (d
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If as a content owner, you want copyright on your stuff and make money out of it I feel you have to protect it on your own. The government already grants you monopoly status on the content through copyright laws but in this and many other cases copyright owners also want the government to protect them against any costs made to protect such status and put those costs back onto society which has already been deprived by the simple asserting of copyright. Copyright is a privilege, not a "right". If you can't m
It's all about... (Score:1)
Nope (Score:2)
If it's come to the point.... (Score:2)