MPAA Threatens World’s Premier Usenet Indexer

[Hairbautt]

http://filesharingtalk.com/vb3/picture.php?albumid=25&pictureid=5865"Newzbin, considered by many to be the internet’s premier indexer and .nzb provider, is under legal threat from the MPAA. The site, which was the creator of Usenet’s answer to the .torrent file, will likely have to undergo significant changes in order to appease the movie studios."

"Newzbin is one of the original Usenet indexing sites and creators of the .NZB format. In a very general way, .NZB files might be considered Usenet’s equivalent of .torrent files. They make the otherwise-complicated Usenet a breeze to use. Downloading from Usenet with Newzbin is easy, and together with a good news provider, very quick.
The increased popularity of services such as Newzbin didn’t go unnoticed with the MPAA. On 22nd May 2008, administrator ‘Caesium’ made an announcement[...]"

:source: Source: Full Article @ TorrentFreak (http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-threatens-worlds-premier-usenet-indexer-080528/)

[Broken]

Bad link to story above...

good link to story (http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-threatens-worlds-premier-usenet-indexer-080528/)

[Hairbautt]

Bad link to story above...

good link to story (http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-threatens-worlds-premier-usenet-indexer-080528/)
Whoops :whistling Thanks.

[Cabalo]

it was just a matter of time until they start to get to the newsgroups... still a safe haven in my opinion.

[Beck38]

A good article, but kinda looses it towards the end.

The 'editors' are in fact 'users', they are 'paid' not directly (which would make them 'employees'), but are given 'credits' for more access ('days' in Newzbin parlance). Many folks who put in a few months of 'duty' have years worth of credits on their accounts, others simply keep going as it is something they've done for years anyway.

FYI, at the going 'rate', each 'day' is worth about 7cents (US), so it isn't much but is something.

Back 'in the day', people simply downloaded the Usenet 'headers' of the newsgroups they figured would have the material they were looking for. With the explosion of Usenet in recent years, this has meant a fair amount of time/bandwidth crawling the groups, looking for headers that might be what one was looking for. Of course, Newzbin helps mightily in that there are hundreds of folks contributing.

But, as a Usenet 'old timer', you'd be surprised (well before the sword rattling going on now) how much they 'miss' (on purpose or...?). There are a dozen or so groups I monitor manually (headers) myself, and I retrieve more than enough to usually keep my link saturated. The 'Giganews Accelerator' has really cut down the amount of time/effort maintaining such a 'watch'.

I think that for the amount of effort put forth on what Newzbin does, that for any 'association' to attempt to replicate the result would be extremely labor intensive, and very costly. If nothing else, they (MPAA et. al.) might use Newzbin as a resource, instead of whacking at them. But as the 'take down' notices at the major pay news-servers have been very few and far between (especially compared to the volume of traffic), it is quite literally a drop in the ocean.

But I haven't seen any slowdown in any indexing, at least as of yet (it's only been just over a week since the 'announcement'). But it appears to be charging forward without much hesitation.

[Chewie]

A good article, but kinda looses it towards the end.Well go let them know so they can tighten it up again, then.

[Hairbautt]

Hope he clicked the link and read the rest of it... :unsure:

[Funkin']

Wow, I"m glad I read this. I was actually going to subscribe soon. And the article states that if you use the site mainly for nzb's(which I would), then to maybe think about not renewing your subscription.

I guess I'll just wait it out and see what happens. I hope nothing happens. I've heard a lot of great things about this indexing site. But then again, there are other free nzb sites that offer, what looks like, about the same amount of content.