Well in effect its enforcing the copyright laws in much the same way as child porn sites are blocked in order to enforce the law. No one protests to that though. The difference is copyright infringement is much more widespread and acceptable.
Copyright laws are outdated and need to be revised. Until this happens piracy will continue to run rampant. Blocking sites, and all the rest of it, simply will not work.
I understand what you're saying, but I think blocking sites like Newzbin is a mistake for the simple reason that is we need to allow people to have access to copyright infringing content so that we can see what effect different legal alternatives have on it. It becomes a very handy metric. For example, in the US, a recent report revealed that Netflix had overtaken Bittorrent in bandwidth usage. Now, if we just somehow magically stopped all torrent traffic, we wouldn't know if the users in question joined Netflix (and are happy with the service) of their own free will, or if they simply had no alternative. It essentially gives people a way of protesting against their current options. Now, you could argue that people should protest by simply not consuming the content (the "think BMWs cost too much? Don't buy one!" arguement), but lets be practical, regardless of what you, I or the law says, many people do not equate piracy to theft.
If you want to block aggregators of illegal content, I'm afraid you're going to have to block all major search engines as well, or at least severely limit the way they index the web. Clearly this isn't going to happen, for various practical reasons. I'm always amazed how little people fighting to protect copyright on the web seem to understand the bigger picture. They really think the sort of people that are willing to join private tracker sites and the like won't find other ways of downloading content? Do they really think the people that have an interest in distributing content wont find another way? Be sure to lock the gate behind you Also, blocking content at a nationwide level is a pretty controversial business anyway as far as freedom of speech and communication is concerned. However, I doubt many people have too much of a problem blocking highly damaging and illegal content such as child pornography. I think using the same tools willy-nilly as a method to block other content could serve to undermine the whole system. I really don't see how the record and film industry think they can win the war against internet piracy by attacking the odd site every few months, or campaigning for some sort of massive worldwide copyright firewall. I'm pretty sure they'd be much better off investing money in reasonably priced subscription services that give people the unlimited access to content they are used to, but make it easier, quicker and more reliable than doing it illegally (ala spotify or netflix).
Ok so this is like Ford being asked to stop selling cars to people who use it for drug runs and bank robberies, and if Ford don't listen they'll get sued for allowing it to happen. Another massive fail...
Possible solution to piracy I can think of Solution mean making people purchase creative industry products Blocking sites won't work. Ineffectual and easy to get around and it does create a nasty precedent for censorship. 1/5 Improving legal affordable ways to gain access to content. Piracy is so easy and risk free that people will persist. Frees better than cheap. 1/5 Making it more risky? Draconian fines/punishment against the minority who are prosecuted (a few high profile cases to scare) in order to make piracy seem a risky option combined with a cheap legal alternatives? 3/5 Copyright protection. Get cracked instantly. 1/5 Can anyone think of a real solutions?
In reality services like netflix have reduced the amount of piracy. Also there are studies that indicate that pirates are people that purchase a lot of legal media. http://torrentfreak.com/former-google-cio-limewire-pirates-were-itunes-best-customers-110726/ http://torrentfreak.com/suppressed-report-found-busted-pirate-site-users-were-good-consumers-110719/
So they block newzbin there is 30+ other sites that are out there and there will probably be another 10 that will open due to this ruling. Open your eyes music/movie/tv industry THIS WILL NOT STOP PIRACY. Give us the content at a REASONABLE price and make it EASY for us to obtain and piracy will drop.
"This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office." One survey and that seems to be the only link. In my view that seems to be more down to young techie pirate's in general being far bigger consumers of media than most other groups. If they couldn't pirate then they would purchase an even large amount rather than just a few favourites. The increasing ease of access via legal means has reduced piracy a little maybe but its certainly not a solution.
Does anyone know how exactly they're blocking the site? Was reading about this sort of thing on Ars a while back, where it was discussing blocking it via DNS, so the DNS would just return a redirected site instead of the actual site. Apparently DNS blocking is easily circumvented anyway. Simply using a different DNS or typing the IP address directly will get around the block. However, if websites start offering alternative DNS' then it could get very dangerous for users, as many people would probably forget to reset back to their normal DNS and could compromise sensitive data (such as bank details).
From the target of all this: https://www.newzbin.com/blog/?p=93 ARSTechnica article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/british-telecom-ordered-to-blacklist-usenet-search-engine.ars When this translates across to the other ISP's it'll simply be a matter of maybe two dozen mouse clicks to add a VPN to my service package for peanuts and their efforts mean nothing. I wouldn't even need to pay, you could most likely use Port Forwarding or a Proxy from the discussions I've seen about the filtering system. I’d like to think that BT using a filtering system designed to curb the distribution of child related pornographic materials to block something as trivial as a news group site (which isn’t even all that widely used) would be the focus of public outrage or at least a controversy worthy of some news coverage. But, unfortunately, this aspect of the whole thing will be overlooked and people will just see it as an evil file sharing site getting what they deserve. This is just trivialising Child porn distribution.
Judge has ordered to add Newzbin2 to their "CleanFeed" service, which BT developed to block alleged Kiddie Pr0n sites. "Once the avalanche has begun, it is too late for even the mountain to vote".
