ISP Will Have to Ban NewzBin2

ISP Will Have to Ban NewzBin2

While the largest entertainment companies are doing their best at censoring the web in the US through the suggested PROTECT IP Act, corporate-sponsored filtering has already come into life in the United Kingdom due to what might become to as a landmark court case.

Now it can be said legally that the web got a little more censored. The British media reported that Hollywood had recently won a major court case in which they were able to compel Internet service providers to block access to virtually any website they want in the name of fighting copyright violation. In this case there was general access to online service known as NewzBin2, which offered an index of NZB files. The matter is that the NZB files point to a file uploaded to file-sharing network UseNet. It is a little like a .torrent file, but it isn’t stored on other people’s PCs, but rather on a server or several of them.

So, by granting the entertainment industry the right to block access to NewzBin2, the only thing the court ruling really does is enable international corporations to censor the web in the United Kingdom. In fact, blocking the service won’t amount to anything in the end except a temporary minor inconvenience for some Internet users.

The most interesting in the judge’s ruling was his words that the UK Internet service provider BT had actual knowledge of subscribers using its service in order to infringe copyright. In other words, it knew that the Internet users and Newbin2 owners infringed copyright on a large scale. Even when BT had argued that the service in question also linked to legitimate content, the court said it was far outweighed by pirated content. So, the judge suggested that Internet service providers knew what everyone on their network was doing, like the operators of a major subway network knew precisely where everyone in the network was going. Meanwhile, even scarier was the suggestion that legitimate material was no excuse to stop the filtering of a site.

The bizarre part of the story is that the censorship of NewzBin2 will be enforced only in a few months. This will undoubtedly give the service lots of time to find out how to bypass the measure for its British users. In future, activities like this may affect users willing to use the web for legitimate purposes, but it is very unlikely that it’ll manage to even come close to putting a dent on file-sharing.