NZBsRus Shrugs Off FACT Letter To Cease And Desist
Last Updated: Dec 01, 2011
Usenet Service Providers, Newsreaders, NZBSites and other Usenet related software and news by usenetreviews.org
We’ve been telling you about the MPAA and RIAA attempts at taking down and eliminating Usenet networks under the auspices of copyright protections. They even won a small victory in the British courts with an order that an ISP remove Newzbin and Nezbin2 from their DNS. But earlier this month, the Federation Against Copyright Theft issued a Cease and Desist letter to NZBsRus, and were answered by the owner closing the site after a couple of hours of deliberation…
Migrating To Another Server
But the removal of the site to satisfy FACT was going to be shorter than the court order that didn’t work very well. It seems that NZBsRus may have already considered the scenario that the CAD letter had placed on them, and they had an escape plan already in place. Their administrators immediately started migrating the site to another server outside of FACT’s influence. In the beginning they were only allowing VIP access, and the forums were down, but the announcement said simply “Guess who’s back?”
When it was all finished, the migration took a total of three days. They had to move more than 100 GB of data to the new server. They also made noises about the RAID configuration being wrong and that there were partitioning issues at first…but these are the kinds of things that site developers live for, and they are often simply solved. Right now, the site is back up to it’s former self, with maybe a little more polish. Forums are running at full tilt, we checked out our account and nothing was lost, so we went ahead and registered a new free account to make sure that the registration process went smoothly, and it went as expected.
The FAQ Disclaimer
While they were migrating the site, they must have consulted an attorney, because they updated their FAQ to include the following statement:
“Our site is completely legal in Europe, USA, etc. Our site does not host any actual media or content. We simply provide moderated and selected indexes of content contained in Newsgroups. We didn’t upload those files ourselves, nor do we support them in any way.”
And we have to agree with them, in no way do we support, endorse, or participate in copyright infringement. Our motto being the same as many others, “Try it, if you like it, buy it.”
Nothing Lasts Forever
Earlier this year the British magistrates order to blacklist Newzbin’s indexing and search sites set a dangerous precedence. It showed the MPA that if you try long enough, and often enough, no matter if you are right or wrong, you can win. And win they did, but the victory must have been hollow when they realized that Newzbin developers had circumvented all their measures to make the site disappear. With the victory they won, we are starting to wonder if FACT will maintain the same tenacity. After all, the magistrates order didn’t affect anybody that didn’t want it to, because their tenacity was outmatched by the determined attitude of the masses that wanted Usenet access.
