Film Studios Win Usenet Download Case
Please note, I am not condoning the illegal downloading of movies or music with this post. However, with London’s High Court ruling, it essentially states that you are no longer allowed to distribute information which potentially could be used in order to conduct illegal activity. Going by the logic of this case, it will eventually be illegal to let you know that there’s a group of illegal immigrants who often hang out waiting for work by my local 7-11 if you need cheap manual labor, and Google could be held liable for indexing sites which sell marijuana seeds.
One site I enjoy visiting is i-hacked.com, a site which offers tips and tricks for hacking electronic devices for uses other than originally intended – for instance, you can learn how to make a home-made stun gun with little more than a disposable camera. Some of these tricks are inevitably illegal. However, there is a clear disclaimer telling viewers that using the information provided may cause legal problems, and the information is there for educational purposes only – why not just force Newzbin to do something similar? While it may seem at first only illegal activity could come from a site such as i-hacked, the fact is hacking devices is nothing more than exploration and experimentation, fostering creativity. Once you learn one alternative application of a device, you can think of multiple other alternative applications.
Another problem with shutting down a site such as Newzbin is that shutting them down (or imposing a hefty fine) does not solve the problem of illegal material being hosted on the internet. Users will just use google to find another site which indexes these movie clips. While it doesn’t happen very often, google’s servers have crashed. What did we do when this happened? Switch over to ask, yahoo, bing, altavista, or some other search engine for the time being. Stopping Newzbin would have a similar effect.
Finally, I believe the MPA is missing a golden opportunity from their end. Clearly, they already have someone with an account set up at Newzbin (and undoubtedly at numerous other sites as well). Why not use the information they have against the owners of the real perpetrators, the ones hosting the actual movies? They essentially have at their disposal a directory of all the people who break the law with regards to copyright infringement and file sharing – you might as well use that list to go after the hosts.
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