TorrentFreak: Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order
News-Service.com, one of the leading Usenet providers with many prominent resellers, has terminated its services with immediate effect. The shutdown is the direct and unavoidable outcome of a two-year battle with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which was eventually decided against the Usenet provider. News-Service announced that it will appeal the decision “out of principle” as it threatens the entire 30-year-old Usenet community.
However, it's the reasoning behind this decision that should alarm everyone:
The verdict of the Amsterdam Court is very similar to the one that decimated BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago. It requires NSE to finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers, which is practically impossible.
Aside from threatening many other Usenet providers, a similar judgement would also mean the end of file-hosting sites such as Megaupload, and other cloud storage services including Dropbox. All these services remove copyrighted files when they are asked to, but policing their own servers proactively may prove to be impossible.
BREIN is nevertheless delighted with the verdict of the court. “It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik said previously.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if BREIN now waves this verdict in the face of other Usenet providers, in the hope of shutting them down. Using this same tactic BREIN has already managed to pull hundreds of (small) torrent sites offline in the Netherlands.
So, if service providers like news-service.com can't ensure that all illegal content on their servers will be deleted, they have to shut down. This is simply insane. Try applying this logic to other service providers. Can, for instance, a motel "find a way to identify and prevent all illegal activity" on its premises? Can an airline guarantee none of the people or things it moves will be used in the commission of some crime, or indeed that no-one on board is a drug mule, or carrying a pirated CD? If not, should they be shut down? By this logic, yes.
More decisions like this will simply mean that more and more Internet traffic is going to be conducted through darknets and other practically invisible connections that are impossible to police or monitor. In short, they're driving the Internet underground. At best, all this kind of bludgeoning legislation will accomplish is driving legitimate service providers out of business and replacing them with a black market. That isn't in anyone's interest. At the same time, our freedom to use the Internet to interact with other people and express ourselves is being severely curtailed, all in the name of the supposedly lost sales of a few giant multi-national corporations.
These cases very nicely define whose interests the justice system is looking out for.
