News - BT ordered to block access to 'pirate' download site

[Spud1]

In general "usenet sites" are hosting and distributing content.

You have to be very careful about what you refer to as a "Usenet site".

Places like newzbin, nzbmatrix, binsearch and the do NOT host any illegal/pirated content whatsoever. They even go to great lengths to make sure that serial numbers etc are not available from them. They also do not link directly to any pirated/illegal files.

They are the direct equivalent of thepiratebay/torrentspy/et al - they index that service, but don't actually host the content or link to it. Usenet is really an advanced P2P service, way beyond most "pirates" but flys the same flag, so to speak.

Actual usenet hosts like Giganews and their many many white labels, easynews and so on..these are the people actually hosting the content, and yes it really is commericalised piracy. There are just as few arguments for hosting binary newsgroups as there are for running torrent trackers - sure you can get legitimate content from both, but the overwhelming majority of content available is illegal.

The ISPs would do a much better job of combatting piracy if they were to block the standard NNTP and P2P ports, rather than specific fringe websites that really have no effect. Or even better, forget targetting the "customers" alltogether and continue to focus on targeting the scene groups that are releasing this content into the wild.

Operation Fastlink/Buccaneer/SiteDown etc were very successful and did a lot of damage for a while, particularly in the ISO scenes. The biggest groups like Fairlight and razor just vanished for a while, and some headway was even made to the movie scenes with the dismantling of Centropy.

I'd wager that if they invested the money spent on lawyers targetting the customers into more operations like these (which take years to build) that we'd see a lot more success.

I have always found "the scene" and this particular criminal underworld very interesting, and information is readily available to those who look hard enough. Investigators who can be dedicated to this kind of research will surely be hundreds of times better at it than me, surely this is a much better approach..though perhaps there is not enough money in it for the industry, or the governemnt really isn't as interested as they would have us believe. Who knows..

[jim]

I agree. With a few quid for some dedicated servers and a green light from the industry, you could find out a heck of a lot within just a couple of months.

Only problem is, I'm not sure how influential the scene are outside of video games. It takes something special to crack executables and so on, but encoding video on the other hand... anybody can learn how to do that given a bit of time and hardware that's up to the task.

[Spud1]

Only problem is, I'm not sure how influential the scene are outside of video games. It takes something special to crack executables and so on, but encoding video on the other hand... anybody can learn how to do that given a bit of time and hardware that's up to the task.

The key thing with video piracy is the source and how good it is - the majority of good quality releases do require a lot of skill to put out still - if its a cam then ok, you just need to encode..but the industry isn't really bothered about them anymore since the quality is so poor, especially in this HD age. Telecines are hard to get hold of (you need a well placed source for one of these), and they are not something your average P2P release "group" (outside of "the scene") will get hold of.

DVD/BR screeners are the real problem since these are high quality..but they also include some nifty copy protection these days that goes well beyond simple watermarking/timecodes, and it takes a lot of skill to completely remove all this (and thus protect the source).

I'm talking purely about pre-release stuff here of course - things change completely once a product, game or video,has been released to the masses in the form of a DVD/Blu-ray and so on. There is nothing that can really be done at that point since as you say, anyone wiht a PC can encode a video, rar it up and put it out on bit torrent.

Difficult problem to solve really.

[BobF64]

Difficult problem to solve really.

Difficult because those trying to solve it are doing it wrong.

The more effort you put into preventing something, the less useful that item is to an every day consumer.

Whilst, fairly obviously, if you just allow people to do anything with it, youd have trouble making any money without changing to a different revenue stream.

It always reminds me of when Radiohead made their album available on a "pay what you want" system.

Even though you could choose to pay nothing, people still "pirated" it via torrents etc.