Anti-Piracy Outfits Go After Usenet Services, with Varying Degrees of Success

Satisfied, or not, with their work against BitTorrent piracy, well, against BitTorrent in general, the media companies have moved on to a new target, Usenet sites that, more often than not, host or link to pirated content.

Already, anti-piracy groups are scoring some victories, some more shallow than others. For example, News-Service.com, one of the biggest Usenet providers was forced to shut down operations following a court order.

The service was attacked by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN who went to court to have it remove all copyright infringing content from its servers and service.

The group won in court and the judge ordered News Service to clean up its act, TorrentFreak reports. In return News Service asked for some time to appeal and to not be forced to shut down the service during that period.

But its request was denied, so News Service has shut down, taking countless resellers down with it, since it's the biggest provider in Europe.

The court did not ask News Service to shut down, it merely asked to to remove all infringing content. But anyone with any technical knowledge knows that that's pretty much impossible.

News Service says it will appeal the decision, but, in the meantime, it has to comply with the court order and shut down the entire service.

In other Usenet news, provider Newzbin2 is now being censored in the UK by ISP BT. The ISP was ordered by a court in the UK to block any traffic to the site and the service.

BT was ordered to do this since it already has a filtering system set up which was supposed to be used only against child abuse sites. Clearly, this is no longer the case.

Of course, surprising no one, Newzbin2 is boasting that the filter is largely ineffective since it has put out a software client, now used by 93 percent of its BT users, which sets up an encrypted connection to the service, impervious to tampering.