Yesterday the Antwerp Court of Appeal ordered the Belgian ISPs Belgacom and Telenet to initiate DNS blockades of 11 domains connected to The Pirate Bay within 14 days or face fines.

The local anti-piracy movement applauded the verdict, which they see as a landmark case that will open the doors for further censorship attempts. However, it is questionable that it will have much of an effect.

Earlier today we already reported how the usenet indexing site Newzbin2 updated its anti-censorship client to allow Belgians to keep their access to The Pirate Bay. And a few hours later The Pirate Bay team delivered an even easier solution.

“The Judge obviously has no idea what he’s dealing with, because the verdict of this expensive court battle can be easily undone,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak.

“Just a few minutes ago we registered a new domain that’s not listed in the order. We have already started pointing users from Belgium to the new address, so they know where to go when their ISPs implement the DNS blockade.”

The new domain name is “depiraatbaai.be,” the literal translation of The Pirate Bay in Dutch. The new domain is already pointing to The Pirate Bay’s servers and people accessing the standard domain from a Belgian IP-address will be redirected to the new home.

“We have to admit that Belgian domain names are not cheap, but we have to make a stand here,” The Pirate Bay team told us.

The above is a clear example that the people judging on these issues don’t have the slightest idea what they’re dealing with. This is supported by the fact that the actual court order only lists the www domains of The Pirate Bay and not the bare addresses (www.thepiratebay.org vs. thepiratebay.org).

The ‘error’ above was pointed out by Maarten Schenk and soon picked up by the mainstream media in Belgium. They point out that if the verdict is taken literally, the ISPs don’t have to block the domains without the www. A massive failure.

“Let’s hope the ISPs are brave enough to put this theory to the test,” The Pirate Bay team notes.

The take home message is, as always, that there are plenty of options for users and site admins to bypass these and other censorship attempts. Or as John Gilmore once said: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

For the time being the number of Belgian visitors to The Pirate Bay is only going up.

Source: The Pirate Bay Adds Domain to Bypass Court Order

Popularity: unranked [?]

Newzbin1, as we shall call it for clarity, was an extremely successful Usenet indexing service. At its peak it turned over around £1 million from its 700,000 members, but eventually attracted the unwanted of Hollywood lawyers.

Having lost its legal battle with the MPA in March 2010, in May it collapsed under a mountain of debt, only to resurrected under new management as Newzbin2.

The site has gone about its business ever since, continuing in pretty much the same manner as it did before the closure and indexing the same content – including Hollywood movies. One would think, therefore, that in common with dozens of torrent sites, file-hosting services and even search engines like Google, Newzbin2 would be overwhelmed with DMCA takedown requests. Not so, says Mr White of Team R Dogs, the group behind the site.

“Oddly we seem to get very few DMCA notices and when we contact the sender we are ignored. I’ve sent any number of email replies to email addresses which state ‘we monitor this email account’ only to receive no reply,” Mr White told TorrentFreak. “Why, it’s almost as if they are just sending them without caring if anything is done.”

Since the DMCA takedown notice is one of the most powerful weapons for removing content, or in the case of Newzbin2 mere links to content on the Internet, it’s strange that the site doesn’t get many. Even more so when the site, in Usenet terms, is Hollywood enemy #1. So are the MPA interested at all?

“We’ve had /one/ DMCA notice since December & even that wasn’t from the Hollywood Dirty Half Dozen but a software maker,” Mr White explained. “We emailed them and they totally blanked us. We’d be perfectly happy to take it down if they’d identified the posts.”

Of course, while DMCA notices can be a useful tool, they’re by no means the only one available to use against file-sharing sites. Currently the MPA are locking horns with ISP BT in the UK in an attempt to have Newzbin2 blocked there.

“The MPA’s lame attempt at censoring us in the UK won’t be permitted to cut Brits off from us if it happens,” insists Mr White.

However, with the recent domain seizures in the US ringing in everyone’s ears – not least the operators of Newzbin2 – there may be a more direct way of reducing traffic to the site on a worldwide basis, but Team R Dogs don’t appear too concerned.

“We are making sure that the site is going to be around for the long haul. Given the shenanigans of the US government, with its unlawful domain seizure project, we may need to change domains to non-US ones: we have solutions for that in place, with backup domains,” Mr White assured us.

With the future in mind, Mr White told TorrentFreak that there are plans to upgrade the site to make it more reliable and improve coverage of Usenet content.

“While we have backup servers and databases in several global locations we plan to migrate systems to fully distributed & redundant global databases & webservers so that any one server going AWOL won’t bring the site down, or even need backups to be brought manually online.”

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Popularity: unranked [?]

At the beginning of May, Usenet indexing site Newzbin finally collapsed after its copyright infringement battle with several Hollywood studios.

Fans and supporters of the site soon found reason for optimism though, when it was revealed that someone had previously hacked the Newzbin servers and grabbed the source code and several databases.

Adding to the intrigue, a group calling themselves Team R Dogs/Newzbin2 contacted ex-members of Newzbin last week with a message claiming that they would soon bring back the site.

“The crew got most of the original Newzbin source code and the main databases,” said Mr White from the group. “We loved it too much to let it die.”

So it seems that Newzbin could be making a comeback, but the mystery doesn’t stop there. Both the Newzbin.com and Newzxxx.com (Newzbin’s sister adult site) domains have been transferred to Seychelles-based WCIS Limited as can be seen via WHOIS here and here.

As readers will be aware, The Pirate Bay was also transferred to a Seychelles-based company when it had legal troubles.

To shine some light on these developments, the folks over at UsenetShack managed to catch up with an anonymous ex-director of Newzbin to ask a few questions, to which they received some interesting responses.

In respect of the domain name transfer, the unnamed source says that due to money problems and the need to appease company creditors, Newzbin raised funds by selling the site’s domain name but continued to have the use of it “on a leaseback basis”. The ex-directors of Newzbin categorically deny that they are behind the Seychelles company.

As for the liquidation, the source says he finds it “difficult” to imagine who would want to buy the remaining assets of the site with a view to bringing it back “unless they have big clanging balls of steel or they want to transform Newzbin into a legal NZB service”.

So what about Team R Dogs? The source claims that the code they acquired is probably an old version of the site, leading to an assumption they could have been in possession of it for some time. Furthermore, the source speculates that since a number of outside contractors had access to Newzbin’s code, it could be that Team R Dogs are one of those and the hacking claims could be just a cover story.

If all these threads collide and Newzbin eventually comes back under its old (current) domain name, that would be quite a feat and a massive annoyance to the MPA who did a huge amount of work to bring the site to its knees.

At the time of publication, WCIS Limited did not return our request for comments.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 3% [?]

After a ruinous battle with Hollywood, Usenet indexing site Newzbin finally folded earlier this month.

Run by an ex-Newzbin editor, the DeepSharer blog quickly reported a rumor that someone had previously hacked the Newzbin servers and grabbed the source code and several databases.

“The Newzbin source code is in the wild,” confirmed Caesium, ex-owner of Newzbin. “Someone has it. I don’t know who, and I don’t know what they’re going to do with it, and I don’t really much care…[...]…whoever obtained it didn’t get it through me – how did they get it? I don’t know.”

Sure enough, in the last couple of days someone called Mr White from Team R Dogs/Newzbin2 has contacted ex-members of Newzbin with an interesting message.

“Good news: we are Newzbin Two, and we have glad tidings: NEWZBIN IS BACK! and we are the new management. The crew got most of the original Newzbin source code and the main databases. We loved it too much to let it die,” says Mr White.

“We are nearly there but it is very complicated. We reckon we’ll up very soon,” he adds.

There can be little doubt, this group have the customer database at the very least since they contacted ex-members of Newzbin using the addresses subscribers used to sign up on the site. Time will tell what other data they have acquired but if the full NZB database is one of them, things could get very interesting indeed.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Newzbin is one of the original Usenet indexing sites and the creator of the immensely-popular .NZB format, which opened up simplified Usenet downloading to the masses.

While the major BitTorrent sites were in Hollywood’s spotlights as the major source of copyright infringement, Usenet sites such as Newzbin remained untouched.

This changed, however, when the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the MPAA’s big brother, sent a threatening letter to the site’s operators in 2008.

This letter was followed by an official announcement of a lawsuit against the Usenet indexer early 2009. The case eventually went to the High Court in February of this year where Newzbin was found liable for copyright infringement.

The court ordered the company that operates the site to stop indexing movies and TV shows to which the Hollywood studios own the copyrights. In addition, Newzbin was told to pay court costs for the MPA, which apparently bankrupted their operation.

“Regrettably the Newzbin website has to close as a result of the legal action against us,” the site’s visitors can now read on Newzbin’s homepage.

The Usenet indexer is linking to a blog post which has additional details on Newzbin’s troubles.

“Apparently Newzbin has been put into administration yesterday because it couldn’t pay its debts. Word is that they owe the MPA £230,000 just in interim costs, and that’s without a full costs ruling or a decision on damages. Apparently they also owe a software development house over £500k,” it reads.

Thus far we haven’t been able to verify the legitimacy of these claims with the Newzbin team, but since the post is linked on the homepage we assume it holds some truth. We will update this article when we find out more.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 1% [?]