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back to article Piracy haven Newzbin2 gives up, can't pay the bills

Downloads search engine Newzbin2, formerly Newzbin, has thrown in the towel. The Usenet-scouring website was the centre of a landmark legal judgment brought by Hollywood studios against BT, which resulted in the website being blocked by UK ISPs for copyright infringement. Now the operators at newzbin2.es have blamed a variety …

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  1. jai

    so...

    does this mean that movie piracy in the UK is so large that blocking BT is sufficient enough to cripple a site? surely there's other people in the world that were using this service?

    it wasn't even that great, there are much better ways to find stuff on usenet (although, admittedly, you do have to pay, so probably that's immediately caused most freetards to slink back to their torrent sites)

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  2. g e

    So are they going to Open Source the code?

    Assuming it's not already, I suppose...

    TPB might want to snap that up for their mega decentralised uber encrypted ultranet thingy (that was TPB, right?)

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    1. Code Monkey
      Reply Icon
      Angel

      Re: So are they going to Open Source the code?

      It's a Usenet scraper. If you've 15 mins spare you could knock one up yourself.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So are they going to Open Source the code?

        > If you've 15 mins spare you could knock one up yourself.

        Took me a bit longer than that. About a days worth of work.

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      2. Chris007
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        Re: So are they going to Open Source the code?

        15 minutes to knock one out - I could manage 2?

        what - oh, sorry...

        6 0
  3. Drefsab

    hmm

    Im not sure thats the case there were many ways around the blocks, plus the issues they stated about editors is credible. There are a great many more nzb sites out there more are popping up all the time, hell its simple to setup your own if you want.

    At the end of the day pirates are going to pirate. The closure of newzbin while a bit of a pain doesnt stop piratcy in any way shape or form. Most of my auto downloading stuff was set to have other sites as backups, all I did was remove newsbin as a search provider and carry on as normal.

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  4. joeW
    Thumb Up

    The herd of elephants analogy

    I've never heard that one before, and would like to thank you profusely for it.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The herd of elephants analogy

      Personally, I could have happily lived my entire life without the mental imagery of "a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea".

      1 0
  5. John Styles

    Nostalgia

    Back in the days when American TV shows got shown here ages after they were shown in the U.S. and back when there were things worth watching, I used to pay fo one of these premium news servers. The joy of downloading Buffy / X-Files episodes over NTL dial-up, then assembling the parts then unRARing them.

    It is frightening how long ago it was that Buffy and the X-Files finished.

    I think the last thing I downloaded was the first episode of Tru Calling. Whilst I commend the TV network for knowing their audience, in having a series that involved Eliza Dushku running between places without adequate support (*), it didn't quite seem worth the few dollars a month.

    (*) I hope she got danger money.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Whodda Thunk?

    ...pirates not wanting to pay their bills.

    1 1
  7. Alan Brown Silver badge

    No surprise

    I used to own one of the top 500 NNTP servers. Binaries killed the economics of running Usenet servers by 1998 (and spammers killed off most of the interest in participating well before that)

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  8. Nigel Brown
    Pirate

    I will miss Newzbin/2. For a mere ten bob a week other folks did the tedious trawling through headers and popped the results into a nice little index file.One of it's greatest strengths for me was the raw search,this was worth far more than the weekly sub by itself. When the original Newzbin closed, I sought out alernative NZB sites, and not one of them is/was a patch on NB.I'm certainly not going back in time and downloading headers myself, so if it doesn't show on an indexing site I'll do without.

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  9. Sp0ck
    Unhappy

    Not that Pirates won't pay, more like can't pay

    The impression I got was the various providers of payment services refused to allow Newzbin2 as a customer. So the Newzbin2 users could not top up their accounts.

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