Newzbin

» see newzbin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Usenet binaries were a paid habit. You needed a subscription to a news server before you could download anything, on top of whatever you were already paying for the line, and on top of that people paid Newzbin for the index that made the news server usable. Three bills to get one film. Where I was, the things people actually used were free and public and needed no account, so this whole layer of the internet reached me as court reporting rather than as software.

The site started in 2002 and became a company in 2004, run by Chris Elsworth with two others. What it solved was genuinely hard. A film posted to Usenet arrives as hundreds of encoded fragments scattered across newsgroups under filenames that tell you nothing, and the whole pile expires off the servers after a while. Newzbin had human editors who read the raw feed and tied the pieces back into one titled entry, then generated an NZB file that pointed a downloader at exactly the right posts. The format outlived the site and is still what Usenet downloaders eat.

By the time it reached court in 2010 there were roughly seven hundred thousand registered accounts, most of them long dormant, and the 2009 filings showed turnover above a million pounds with profit above three hundred and sixty thousand. It was a small, profitable British business whose product was a very good map of somebody else's warehouse.

~ the record ~

~ the case ~

Twentieth Century Fox and the other studios sued in 2009, and Mr Justice Kitchin gave judgment in March 2010. The finding was not that Newzbin copied anything. It was that the editorial work of sorting the posts and labeling them amounted to authorizing the copying, and that the site knew exactly what its Movies section was for. That distinction is the reason the case still gets cited: it moved the liability from the person with the file to the person with the catalog.

The company went into liquidation and the site closed on 18 May 2010. By 2 June a Newzbin2 was live from the Seychelles, running on the same database and telling everyone the assets had been bought out of the wreckage. The studios went back to court, this time aiming past the site entirely.

~ the blocking order ~

On 26 October 2011 Mr Justice Arnold ordered BT to block its roughly six million customers from reaching Newzbin2 within fourteen days. BT already had the machinery, since it had built Cleanfeed years earlier for child abuse material, and the studios argued that a filter which exists can be pointed at something else. The court agreed.

It was the first time a British court ordered an internet provider to block a site for copyright, and every UK blocking order since runs down the same track. The blocks themselves were never much of an obstacle to anyone who wanted around them. What they did was make a site radioactive to everyone it needed in order to function.

~ how it actually ended ~

Newzbin2 posted its closing notice on 28 November 2012, and the reasons in it are unglamorous. The indexing had gotten worse and the volunteer editors had drifted away. Servers were unstable and nobody would process the subscriptions any more, after the studios sued PayPal and went after the site's UK payment company directly. About forty thousand people were still active, a few thousand of them paying.

So the block did not kill it and neither did the judgment. What killed it was that a business built on small monthly payments cannot survive being cut off from the ability to take small monthly payments. The court order was the thing that made every processor in the chain decide it was not worth the argument.

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