Newzbin2, the MPAA’s Usenet Enemy #1, Calls it Quits

[silicon_toad2000]

After a long battle with the international arm of the MPAA, Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has called it quits. The site had been operating under adverse conditions, not least almost total censorship by a court-ordered ISP blockade in the UK. Add to this a climate of fear driving individuals providing vital services away from the site, plus legal action against PayPal aimed at Newzbin2′s UK-based payment provider, and the site’s operators have decided to shut down.

While the newsgroup system has been running for years, in some ways it was the original Newzbin site that put Usenet binary downloading on the map of the masses.

The site created the NZB format, in basic terms .torrent files for newsgroups, which massively simplified the downloading of files from Usenet. This new-found ease of use attracted many to the previously difficult and inaccessible system and helped to kick-start a wave of Usenet indexing sites.

The subsequent popularity of Newzbin was not appreciated by the MPA, who sued the site’s operators. The action proved ruinous and in May 2010 left the site with debts of anywhere between £500K and £700K, depending on whose estimates you believe.

But through all the misery came a ray of light for the site’s former users. Newzbin was to be resurrected by a team of hackers called Team R Dogs, of which Mr White was the most public-facing.

Although the site did come back as Newzbin2, things were not going to be easy. The MPA, who were stinging that the site they had killed had somehow reanimated, began legal action to have the site blocked at the ISP level in the UK.

After much wrangling, October 26 2011 Justice Arnold at the High Court handed down a written judgment to BT, one of the UK’s largest Internet service providers. It ordered the company to block subscriber access to Newzbin2 within two weeks.

Newzbin2 responded with an encrypted software client to circumvent the ban which did go some way to getting users back on the site, but the MPA still weren’t done and continued pressing for more ISP blocks.

http://torrentfreak.com/newzbin2-the-mpaas-usenet-enemy-1-calls-it-quits-121129/