Andre Yoskowitz
19 Oct 2008 18:51
Although newsgroups had largely remained outside of the focus of lawsuits aimed at P2P users, the media industry has started to notice.
In response, major ISPs have discontinued their support of newsgroups or restricted them only to news reports.
The only major newsgroups that are remaining are Giganews and major indexing services such as Newzbin. Slyck defines Newzbin as operating "similarly to BitTorrent indexing sites, as they both act like card catalogs in a library. Similar to BitTorrent indexing/tracking sites, Newzbin contains no copyrighted work on their servers - only NZB files. NZB files are analogous to torrent files; like torrent files, NZB point the user to where the file is located on the network."
It appears Newzbin is expecting lawsuits however just like their BitTorrent indexing brothers and the company announced today that it has "received two distinct complaints" regarding the service they employ.
"It is likely that we will in the coming weeks be presented with a court case and have to defend our rights," the announcement reads. "We will be defending ourselves vigorously against both the complainants if necessary and we believe a court will agree with our view that linking to content on Usenet is indeed legal and our method of dealing with unlawful content is appropriate. We believe that, or we wouldn't still be here."