Comments on: RIAA scores in Usenet case

By: Rabbit80

Rabbit80 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:37:34 +0000

If they are fined the maximum statutory at $150000 per infringement, they still only get a $1.35 Million fine… Less than Jammie Thomas did for 24 songs

By: Chairman Miao

Chairman Miao — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:46:50 +0000

IANAL, but… The commercial Usenet services have been living on borrowed time since Grokster, where the Supremes threw out the substantial-noninfringing-uses standard of the Betamax case and replaced it with a very vague “are you making the bulk of your income from copyright infringement” standard. I expect that something like this Grokster standard will be found to trump the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions; it will be argued that the DMCA Safe Harbor was intended to provide a defense to incidental or occasional infringement, but should not apply when a random statistical sampling shows that the majority of the defendant’s traffic is infringing.

Nothing like this came into play with the Usenet.com case, as the defendants so pissed off the judge that he decided to destroy them without allowing any defense. But the surviving commercial Usenet services will have to ask themselves if they want to bet everything they own on a DMCA Safe Harbor defense working.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:00:39 +0000

Usenet may be the next major battleground between the RIAA and file sharing community. Unlike torrents and other P2P, downloading from Usenet is 100% risk-free: no lawsuits, no ISP warnings, no 3-strikes. Usenet thwarts all these RIAAs methods to supress file sharing.

Usenet.com was an exceptional case because they purposely directed users to infringing content and advertised it as a safe alternative to the lawsuit risk of downloading MP3s from P2P. Most usenet providers seem to take a “see no evil” approach: they must surely know that illegal stuff is there, but all they can do is secretly hope users will quietly find it on their own.

Even if this lawsuit results in Usenet.com shutting down, it won’t make any difference in reducing infringement because all the other usenet newsgroup providers carry exactly the same content.

Of course no one pays Giganews $30 a month just to read text discussions – and Giganews would rather not know what people are using it for.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:14:23 +0000

Also, I’d love to hear Ray B.’s take on what this means for other providers…

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:09:20 +0000

As someone who downloads from Usenet on a daily basis, this ruling scares the crap out of me. No, I’m not worried that I’ll get sued or anything like, I’m worried that the RIAA will use this stupid judge’s ruling to try and sue every other Usenet provider into oblivion.

The judge basically said that they were responsible for what people post through their servers, and if one Usenet provider is guilty of that, then all Usenet providers are guilty of that.

They will use this as a club to try and eliminate all the alt.binaries groups. Of course, the elimination of those groups would also put the providers out of business since nobody is going to pay huge monthly fees for text groups.

I would REALLY like to hear Liz chip in here with an opinion from Giganews’s legal department on the potential ramifications this ruling, if it stands, will have on other Usenet providers. At least those in the US.

By: surfer

surfer — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:13:19 +0000

please dont confuse usenet.com and the protocol known as usenet

‘One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh. ‘ – wiki

big win, big woopdedoo, I never heard of usenet.com until the asshats busted it. Notice how on lamescream media websites this news is above USA troops leaving Iraq, and below details of wacko jacko’s post-mortem circus.

While i ‘feel’ for p2p advocates when they get busted (awwwww), i typically look a little closer….

If you look down the barrel of a gun while pulling the trigger without ‘grasping’ the outcome, then, well, your an idiot.

‘If you leave muddy footprints while surfing the net, they can see where you trod.’ – surfer

stw, with at least a modicum of intelligence.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:02:12 +0000

“prevent employees from giving depositions by sending them to Europe” – Of course they were not sending them for vacations, Usenet.com maintains a Eropean server farm(s) for their customers.