Court rules Usenet is responsible for its content: mega-fine may end usenet

Alpha1

Alpha1

Well-known member
The Dutch court has ruled that a major Usenet provider (news-service.com) needs to remove all content that infringes on copyright. The Usenet provider needs to do so within for weeks or pay €50.000 ($68.000) per day. The court does not give any consideration to the fact that usenet gets 15 to 20 million posts per day and usenet has no method to filter content. The Usenet provider states they are simply transmitting content, much like an internet provider does.
The court ruling may have large implications to other internet services, like forums, but also file hosting like megaupload, drop box, etc.

Its not the first time that courts have come to such a ruling. A similar court ruling 2 years ago terminated the website and service mininova.

Read more:
http://torrentfreak.com/major-usenet-provider-ordered-to-remove-all-infringing-content-110929/
 
Sigh. Still an idiotic ruling, in my humble opinion.

Yes, illegal downloading is bad. No one should do it. However!

- There is no viable alternative.
- Media products (games, movies, software) are often highly overpriced and made with limited efforts just to grab in money.
- If no one can download anymore, the need for high speed internet and stuff like external harddisks won't be needed anymore. After all, the most intense thing you can then do with internet on a regular basis for a regular customer is watching youtube, so anything more than 8mb/s isn't really needed. External harddisks? Meh, who needs Terrabytes if you can't download?

Sigh.
 
This and other rulings are steadily moving in disadvantage to site owners. This does not only pertain to music or videos but also to copyrighted text. What this means is that its no longer needed to send the site owner a cease and desist letter, but the copyright holder can skip that and go straight for heavy fines and effectively pulling websites of the net. If you consider that many forums host texts /excerpts from books, news articles and other copyrighted material, then you can see what problem is steadily approaching us. Site owners are responsible for the content that they host. We can be confronted with actions against our sites without warning, if we do not fully review & approve all new content.
 
Is it really cost effective for the copyright holders to sue millions of site owners, especially knowing that most of them don't make any profit from their material? To what degree is this new law enforceable considering global nature of internet and size of business entities involved? Can the Dutch court's ruling make China, Russia, Indonesia or Nigeria enforce such a law? Can the Dutch court's ruling shut down Google?
 
Most of the recent developments are important for European sites for now. Organizations like BREIN represent all copyright holders and their only business is laying claims and sending fat bills to sites that infringe on copyrights. In this way it is certainly cost effective. We can certainly expect News agencies to start making use of similar organizations.

In the US the latest Righthaven court rules does give US forums the right to post complete news articles. As a result, news agencies are sharpening up their copyright conditions on their websites. (news articles may only contain a short snippet with a link to the source site/article)
So this is far from over.

The court rules will not affect google, but it can certainly affect youtube.

Another recent development is that no court case is needed anymore to pull European websites from the net that are embedding online radio streams.
 
No, but there's the hypocrisy, they won't go after a company like google (who is effectively doing the exact same thing) because Google will kill it on any attempt.
 
Sador said:
No, but there's the hypocrisy, they won't go after a company like google (who is effectively doing the exact same thing) because Google will kill it on any attempt.
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Actually they already have gone after Google successfully. But they got more than they bargained for: Google excluded the websites of the copyright holders from their results and kicked them into the darkweb.
 
Alfa1 said:
Actually they already have gone after Google successfully. But they got more than they bargained for: Google excluded the websites of the copyright holders from their results and kicked them into the darkweb.
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And they ended up begging Google to return to infringing on their copyrights and promised to never sue the giant again. :D

We just wrote about how the Belgian newspapers who, back in 2006, sued Google for linking to their newspaper websites. Earlier this year, the newspapers won that lawsuit, and the court ordered (as the lawsuit specifically asked for) Google to remove those sites from "all" of its sites. However, when Google actually did that, and their traffic plummeted, the newspapers started freaking out, complaining that Google was being vindictive. Talk about sour grapes from a winner. You get everything you ask for... and then you complain?

Of course, the reality is that these newspapers totally miscalculated. They wanted to have everything, which meant Google sending them all sorts of traffic... and they wanted Google to pay them for the privilege. Of course, after these complaints, it appears Google had a chat with Copiepresse, the organization representing these newspapers, and has "received permission" to put the newspapers back in the index, along with promises that they won't be sued again for copyright infringement for doing so. So what has Copiepresse accomplished? It spent five years fighting Google... and won... and then let Google immediately go back to doing what it was doing before. Nice work, guys.

Source
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If the movie/record industry charged reasonable prices for each track or movie, there PROBABLY wouldn't be so much copywritten stuff on the net.
 
AdamD said:
If the movie/record industry charged reasonable prices for each track or movie, there PROBABLY wouldn't be so much copywritten stuff on the net.
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Hmm .... probably not.
You can't compete with free.

I think the music industry needs changing.
For bands I like, I'd pay for a "multimedia experience", but I'm much less likely to buy a CD.
The multimedia experience would be a download to my portable device.
It would have the lyrics to all the songs (synched up with the music).
It would have pictures that gave meaning to the song, maybe a video.
It might give me a "Free Pass" to a streaming online live concert.
It might make me a registered member of an exclusive forum.
Periodically there could be some "Behind the scenes" exclusive interviews about the songs.
Maybe they might give some free MP3 downloads of some "Remixes" of the songs.
I've felt something like this was needed for a LONG time.

I know one thing for sure .... I'm alot less likely to buy the CD, knowing I'm going to rip it to MP3 before I even play it. Come to think of it ... I don't even have a standalone CD player !!!
 
Many industries can't come to grips with the the changing paradigm. The DMA can't understand why their last best year was the year before they killed Napster (until iTunes). They don't want to give the customer what they want. CHOICE! The "playlist" has always been king. In the fifties we created one by stacking 45's. Later we recorded on cassette. In the seventies albums were king because they were FULL of good music. Now they put one or two hits on and fill the rest with crap. Apple was the first to recognize this and have made gazzilions on singles for a buck!

Most of the "lost revenue" is vapor! Many downloaders are just collector who would not have bought the music if they couldn't just download it free. No lost revenue there. Then there are those who download, like what they hear and then buy. Stopping these is A LOSS to the recording industry and is why Napster was actually helping them.
 
kyrgyz said:
BTW I quit ripping CDs to MP3. I go only to lossless. That's my main gripe with buying MP3 songs on the net.
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Yea. I'm not audiophile.
I'm cool with the .mp3 playing out of my computer speakers or my mobile device.
Certainly lossless don't help with those crappy speakers !!!
 
I custom built my desktop. Asus mobo with TOSLINK S/PDIF digital audio port. Connected to it ONKYO home theatre system with large SONY front speakers (A). Also ran speaker wires to the second pair of speakers (B) in the shower. Even crappy MP3 tracks sound decent. :)
 
kyrgyz said:
I custom built my desktop. Asus mobo with TOSLINK S/PDIF digital audio port. Connected to it ONKYO home theatre system with large SONY front speakers (A). Also ran speaker wires to the second pair of speakers (B) in the shower. Even crappy MP3 tracks sound decent. :)
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WoW!
 
kyrgyz said:
Doubt that. 99 cents per song is an old reality. And yet it didn't kill illegal torrent activity.
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The really big issue isn't price, it's region availability. It makes no sense the the internet is world-wide, but content is forced to only be available to certain parts of the world.

If customers can't get what they want legitimately and they try, companies shouldn't have the right to complain that their content is being downloaded through unofficial means.
 
Onimua said:
The really big issue isn't price, it's region availability. It makes no sense the the internet is world-wide, but content is forced to only be available to certain parts of the world.

If customers can't get what they want legitimately and they try, companies shouldn't have the right to complain that their content is being downloaded through unofficial means.
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The anime and manga industry are an example of this... The majority of manga and anime is never released in the United States, or is not released until licensed by an American company (God knows how long it takes to get it in Europe). Recently the companies have started strongarming more, which has done nothing by harm them as fansub services are about the only reason why so many animes and mangas are so well known outside of Japan.

The ridiculous part is, many of the people who will stream/download fansubs or scanlations also will buy the released copy when available.
 
kyrgyz said:
Doubt that. 99 cents per song is an old reality. And yet it didn't kill illegal torrent activity.
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"Youtube".

As long as I can still watch any music I want in there for free, and can easily download those movies in any format I like without any sort of problem, requesting a dollar for 1 track is still too much. And guess who owns youtube? :P
 
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