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Referencing rules that Newzbin publishes for the attention of [DMCA] editors, ostensibly to protect the site (i.e not posting NZB’s which link to warez, movies or music), Justice Kitchin states that these warnings are “entirely cosmetic”, are not intended, nor are they adhered to. Newzbin knew that infringing copies were being made available to users and yet no action was taken against editors, he wrote.
Referring to groups indexed by Newzbin such as alt.binaries.warez, Justice Kitchin said he is satisfied that the term ‘warez’ refers to content protected by copyright from illicit sources. Newzbin, he said, is therefore designed to search newsgroups which contain infringing material, an assertion that Newzbin’s Chris Elsworth had no “satisfactory explanation” for.
Justice Kitchin said Newzbin “encouraged its editors to report and has assisted its users to gain access” to infringing copies of movies.
Newzbin was also criticized for its “delisting” or notice and takedown procedures, which were referred to as a “cosmetic” and “cumbersome” mechanism designed to “render it impractical” for rights holders to have material removed.
Justice Kitchin went on to reject Newzbin’s assertion that an insignificant amount of links in their database relate to infringing content. Around 50,000 reports (.NZBs) were checked and around 97% had a valid link to IMDb (TF: Kitchin apparently assumes that everything on IMDB is not free to share), 0.7% to Amazon and a further 1.5% were otherwise shown to be commercially available. Only 0.3% were not shown to be commercially available, evidence which the court found “extremely powerful”.
The verdict addresses in some detail whether Newzbin had knowledge of infringing material being made available via the site. Newzbin said they did not but would’ve taken action to remove items and take action against any editor posting such material. Justice Kitchen said “a very different picture” emerged when Elsworth was cross-examined.
A transcript of the questioning reveals Elsworth being aggressively cross-examined over the nature of the Blu-Ray category on the site and whether it would contain copyright infringing material.
“I am satisfied that Mr Elsworth well knew that these categories were primarily intended for new commercial films,” wrote Justice Kitchin, while referencing a comment made by Elsworth in January 2007 where he notes that Blu-Ray had “been cracked officially”.
The verdict also states that Newzbin was told that the site is being used to infringe the claimants’ copyrights, yet no action has been taken against those reports (NZBs), the editors that reported them, or users that downloaded them.
Justice Kitchin said that considering the structure of Newzbin, the way they categorize content and the way they have encouraged editors to report movies, he has no doubt that Newzbin knew that “the vast majority of films in the Movies category of Newzbin are commercial and so very likely to be protected by copyright, and that members of Newzbin who use its NZB facility to download those materials, including the claimants’ films, are infringing that copyright.”
For the claimants, Mr Clark gave evidence that it would be straightforward for Newzbin to restrict access to the Movie and TV categories on the site and/or employ a filter based on a list of titles provided by the movie companies. Justice Kitchin said that the Newzbin programmers are skilled enough to implement “an effective content filtering system.”
Source: http://torrentfreak.com/google-score...-sites-100624/
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Originally Posted by torrentfreak
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