Defiant, BitTorrent and NZB Sites Fight Back Against ‘Intimidation’
Written by enigmax on November 10, 2008Last week TorrentFreak reported that South Africa’s answer to the RIAA had taken down the country’s largest torrent site and an affiliated Usenet NZB site. According to the lawyer representing the sites for free, the recording industry had no standing to make a complaint. Furthermore, the actions of the sites’ host were unconstitutional. Both sites, BitFarm and NewsHost, are coming back online.
Following legal threats from the Recording Industry of South Africa (RiSA), last week we reported that the country’s biggest torrent site, BitFarm, and its sister site NewsHost (which deals with UseNet NZBs), were both closed. In many similar cases around the world, the threats would’ve been enough to permanently close the sites, but fortunately lawyer Reinhardt Buys, an expert in IP law, noticed their predicament and stepped up to represent them for free.
In order to get the sites closed, RiSA sent copyright complaint letters to ISPA (the South African ISP association) demanding that BitFarm and Newshost should “be taken down with all access to the domain name blocked”, claiming the sites breach Section 27 (1) (b) of the Copyright Act 98/1978. However, according to the site’s lawyer there are several problems, not least that the sites do not host any infringing content.
In fresh correspondence with ISPA, Reinhardt Buys refutes the allegations made against BitFarm and NewsHost. He states that not only did RiSA fail to comply with the Electronic Communications and Transaction Act 25 of 2002 due to the manner in which it presented the takedown requests, but ISPA acted unconstitutionally in dealing with the takedown requests from RiSA. The relevant section from the South African Constitution is highlighted below:
Everyone has the right to have any dispute that can be resolved by the application of law decided in a fair public hearing before a court or, where appropriate, another independent and impartial tribunal or forum.
According to the correspondence, Buys states that it is uncertain if ISPA even considers the legality of takedown requests before initiating the disconnection of a site, and notes that their current takedown procedures seem to be “directed only at the protection of ISPs from possible liability for third party content, regardless of the evident harm done to online free expression, fairness and equality”.
Interestingly, Buys points to a 2004 submission by ISPA itself, on the ‘Proposed Guidelines for Recognition of Industry Representative Bodies’.
ISPA believe that is it critically important for freedom of speech that a service provider be given an option to take stance on content that is of unclear legal status. Clearly, a service provider should not host content that a court of law or some other authority has ruled to be illegal. But in a case where the legal status of content is unclear (perhaps, for example, if an unproven accusation of hate speech had been made against a particular web page), an ISP should not automatically be required to remove the content. Such a requirement would have a chilling effect on free speech.
However, all of this might be considered moot, since it appears that the complainant, RiSA, had no locus standi or ‘legal standing’ to request the takedown of the sites:
In terms of section 24 of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978, only the copyright owner may institute proceedings related to copyright infringement. The Complainant is not a copyright owner and merely a unit within an organisation that claims to represent the South African recording industry
To this end, Buys has advised the administrator of BitFarm and NewsHost to re-enable both sites and to re-engage in their previous activities, while considering claiming for losses, damages and legal costs from both ISPA and RiSA via civil litigation. In the face of further harassment or intimidation from RiSA, the sites may seek a protective interdict from the courts. Buys has also called on ISPA to implement takedown procedures “which are free of constitutional concerns”.
The full legal response can be found here (pdf).
Previously: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
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63 Responses
Nice.
RIAA PAWNED :P
You dumb shit, it was RISA…
Glad to report, everything is back online again! Downloading patches and stuff like always. :D
Thank you for the article!
The intellectual zeitgeist that is free access culture has won out again and it is time for round 2. Do these websites make money? I for one certainly hope they don’t. The owners should be funding it out of their own pocket. If they dont then culture is constrained by the shackles of Imperialist chains and any vision of a free world is doomed. A culture that has anything but community driven and produced artifacts and art is a dead community in which the participants are deader than zombies in Resident Evil.
The Pirate Bay really, really sucks ass – anyone that thinks it’s good is a hill billy redneck.
Roze
LOL @ Roze. someone watched Zeitgeist not too long ago. they dont make a cent from the sites. the community isnt dead buddy, alive and very well thank you
bitfarm can die please, it is full of noob shit.
aslong as NC stays up :) k thx
Hey, Roze… (by any other name…)
You know TPB is Swedish, right? Surprisingly few rednecks in Sweden.
Also, do you really have to force the rest of the world through your Americanised filters?
Well, shucks and guddurn!
The highest court of South Africa seems to be able to do much – perhaps it may even change copyright law altogether? I am not putting much faith in that, however. It is much better for something so fundamentally bottom-up as P2P to be supported by a bottom-up movement rather than something top-down like the legal system.
@7
Agreed. The culture in Sweden is actually better than average.
Also, American culture is abominable, and this is coming from an American. I see trash reality shows all the time, and other trash shows all the time. And why is Paris Hilton even talked about by the media and by people in general? My opinion of American culture is at an all-time low right now, and I suppose that it is the same around the rest of the world. I wonder why this is so? Well, whatever the reason, here is my source:
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/Kurlantzick.pdf
@4
The Pirate Bay does provide many useful functions, but since you know little about them, it might be better to point out the Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/The_Pirate_Bay
Roze
http://www.10ch.org/
Ray Beckerman, Michael Geist and now Reinhardt Buys…. three cheers guys!
Its usually one rotten apple in the barrel but these guys are the good apples in a barrel filled with rotten apples.
Keep up the good fight guys!
Cheers!
http://www.eZee.se
As an American who has spent some time in ZA, everything I found to connect to was by the byte. Use the corporate net to connect to the outside world? Go get your own cellular modem for Internet access!
You have to be dedicated and have some serious cash to be doing a lot of it. Fricking Comcast and it’s caps.
Awesome news, We salute Ray Beckerman, Michael Geist and now Reinhardt Buys for their ability to stand and fight for what is right.
And no These sites are of non-profit, there are no adverts, no donations, no nothing and no strings attached. At least the Bitfarm an Newshost communities can now continue to Dominate RSA
@2
F**k you A-Hole!
Read the title once again.
(RISA) is same as RIAA, you F**king n00b,
Get the f**k out of here.
Can you read this: Last week TorrentFreak reported that South Africa’s answer to the RIAA had taken down the country’s largest torrent site and an affiliated Usenet NZB site. ?????????
They didn’t answer to ur Mama, they answered to RIAA, (RISA) is a agent only, main root is RIAA!!!
They have electricity in africa?
news to me.
Ai my kinders, julle is maar ook almal f*kken dom wat dink Bitfarm is die beste, “10 000 users” waar is jul bewyse? F*cken LIES..
Bitfram is good for one thing… SPAMMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I hope they burn in the pit.
@13 No, i’ve got a little negro child running in circles generating power for my uTorrent machine & ADSL router.
Have to replace him every 5 days, they die of AIDS quite quickly now.
@ Mr. Afghanistan:
[ ] You know what a figure of speech is.
[ ] You show brilliant intellectual and social skills.
[X] You’re a knucklehead
RISA is, as well as RIAA, national organisation, organized in the international IFPI.
Not everything on this planet “answers” to U.S. american organisations. Dumbass!
Inform yourself before posting bullshit and call others noobs within the same breath.
You are unbelievable pathetic!
but remember bitfarm runs on negro faeces with AIDS. While ninjacentral is run by white rich people.
Rich people tracker > aids infected tracker
@17 ROFL ROFL ROFL ROFL
Jeeva wa kom jy an sulke krap?
you are most properly one of those oke who were on bitfarm and u only made k@k on the site and they banned you and now you are…. net de moer in omdat jy nie meer access het nie…
@17, nc didnt even go though the trouble to get someone to help to sort it out… for rich ppl u seem to be very lazy. u just waited for bitfarm & newshost to sort it out, and once you noticed that nh and bf is back online then u decided now that everything is sorted by the “aids infected tracker” guys we just as might also put our content back. Didnt you have any downtime after restoring the db as u dont really know how to do it….
@20 That is why people are rich, they rely on the poor little fuckers to sort shit out, then just climb on the bandwagon. Something like capitalism.
Who do you think digged the tunnels under Saigon during the Vietnam war? THE PEONS!. Who used them? THE ARMY!.
ARMY PEOPLE > PEONS.
NC > BITFARM
NOHELP > HALP
Roze stfu your a f*cking idiot, stop parading around here like you know everything.
TPB has done more for free speech online then you ever will in a life time, just because they dont have the best website and search engine doesnt mean they are crap. They dont care, they all party and have a life, and dont give a shit what you think about there website. They have openly invited competition to beat them, they WANT the future and arent trying to hold back technology just to stay on top.
So Roze and all other TPB haters, lets see you do anything 0.001% as constructive as them.. oh wait no you cant because you live in your parents basement downloading shit all day..
F*cking posers, whiners, complainers and losers. Do something instead of bitch, nobody gives a shit what you think, you will never amount to anything except your little online identity you try to claim by posting your shit website like a signature in a ANONYMOUS commenting system.. you have to be the biggest idiot to attempt that.. just like Ezee and H33t, both morons.
- Mr Awesome
http://www.gof*ckyourself.com
@21…. so ur still staying at ur parents at a age of 50?
it seems like u really have a boring life
@13 Hahahahaha!!!
@23
Lol, tuning me under anonymous alias. At least my parents have a house and neither does my internet run via a coin operated system like yours. I AM ADVANCED!
Don’t you just love the Bitfarm user comments.
@19
Lol, bitfarm used to be E-farm, which me & me_savage operated. It was shit, so we dumped it. He gave the site to the noobs, they changed the name, and it went from shit to tihs (the inverse of shit – for retards that read in negroarab), AS IN WORSE. So get your facts straight. Bitfarm is for losers that download torrents from TPB (I <3 TPB so nothing again them) then rename the .txt & .nfo files saying “EXCLUSIVE AFRIKA BITFARM MATERIALZ”.
Says the guy that was banned from bitfarm. Oh wait who started that gay porns site mantrain.co.za again?
All please do me a huge favour and go to:
http://whois.za.net/cgi-bin/whois.cgi
type mantrain.za.net in there, registered to:
jeevadotnet@gmail.com
now check out his site:
http://www.mantrain.za.net
Who is aids infected now dipshit?
Jeeva i must say i “like” ur website verymuch… very like rich ppl website… http://mantrain.za.net/
i dont have to say anything more to make my point.
o ja.. now u also know my identity…
@28
Things do matter, in fact. People pay attention to this blog oft. Little things make a big difference – do not dismiss anything just because it seems too “small.”
Roze
i think if i were to respond the @w[insert number here for retards] would be at an all time hi LOL.
What this really means is that the court there wants the actual artist to whine and complain instead a hiding behind some big gay arsed lil org of lawyers, ya then we know who you are and we can say NO TO YOUR GAY CRAP.
/eggorists r us
/end sarcasm
thank you Reinhardt Buys, and thanx to all of the guys who supports Bitfarm, Newshost and the local filesharing communities.
@25,
Heh! Thanks for trying to impersonate us, we hope you will continue to do so.
Just one thing, try to make your username into a link the we have done so the impersonation will be better or everyone will know that you are just a… bad copy. ;)
Cheers!
iser0073 is a 23 Year old student who is the leader and main distributor of piracy in SA. Bitfarm accepts donations.Iser won’t get catch by RISA or anyone.
i am the troll, me an my cronies, just by the by.
feel free to contact me in #jof on shadowfire
/topic #jof for the proof
ahh, someone that wants to be cool like me.
Get your own nick.
@23
Whats wrong with staying with your parents?
I don’t have living space in my own house because it is full of negro children running around on those dinamo stuff, powering my electrical circuits so that i can get connected on the intertubes. Copperlines need power you know. Especially with their mortality rates (because of XDR-TB & AIDS) I have to buy a whole load of negro-children from the local church bazaar every Sunday morning. You know that old women have great deals, buy 10 Negro (Barack Obama) look alike children and you get a pancake free.
But don’t worry, Ninjacentral lives on in my basement!
nice one!
Yeah you still dont get my point dumbass… nobody thinks this is a ‘bad copy’ because nobody recognizes you as a entity in the first place..
omg his name isnt a hyperlink.. he obviously doesnt know how to use URL tags.. OMG HURHURHURHR.. everybody knows hes a fake!
YOU are a f*cking fake. EVERYONE is a fake.. THIS. IS. AN. ANONYMOUS. COMMENTING. SYSTEM.
Not sure what you dont understand.. this isnt a place to show off your shit website and parade around here like your mr big shot.. im tired of seeing your stupid ass posts on here as if your some kind of authority. And I will continue to prove my point as long as you continue to be a complete douche bag.
Why?
To tell you the truth I think its pretty funny to f*ck with your type, it ruins your day and makes myn.
How about instead of fighting we wake up, smell the air, and figure out were all pirates, and were all the same? Theres no point fighting over which torrent site is better, as like TPB owners said, its better for there to be many of them in case a major one goes down. Everyone has theyre own idea of which is the best, so use that one and shut the hell up about it.
OMG TEH DRAMA!
very very nice presentation of the case
ahHAahaHAHAHA!
This debate between http://www.eZee.se, roze and that other dude is even more entertaining than the actual story on this page!
OUtstanding! Fight on brothas, Fight on!
Jess
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com
is there any special about these BT site in South Africa ? why would RIAA targeting in such remote place ?
Dear god, this has turned into a riot. Lmao at some of the comments!
Debz
http://www.free-paid-surveys.co.cc
Bitfarm is where the leechers and n00bs go that got banned at NC.
Haha.
There are only black people in South Africa, they should not be allowed to have computers.
Nigger countries doesn’t have Internet.
@48 “is there any special about these BT site in South Africa ? why would RIAA targeting in such remote place ?”
OMG, you are a F*CKING R3TARD!!
THEY AREN”T you dumb shit. It’s RISA.
http://www.h33t.com where retards can piss off
Actuley im sorry man.. i apologize..
I shouldnt be getting all upset at fellow pirates.. you are obviously alot smarter then me.
im a complete dumbshit, please excuse me.
please feel free to leach off my crappy site.
http://www.h33t.com where im a big f*cking rod stroker
*This is where I put some random comment that sorta pertains to the article*
*And then this is where I put some f*cking pay site that I think im going to make money off of*
http://www.f*ckinggivememoneyyoud*ck.com
Have I reminded everyone today how intelligent I am?
BTW, I also thought I’d add that my great, fantastic tracker is a HELL of a lot better than TPB. It’s faster, has better web design, more exclusive and best of all I hang out there so you can all get more of my well-though out insights into filesharing and other fun stuff!
http://www.h33t.com where we laugh at users of The Pirate Bay and think we’re so different.
Why does everyone always try to see who has the bigger e-penis?
Maybe someday people will grow up. In any case, Thanks to Mr Buys for taking up a worthy fight. I salute you.
And before some kid flames me for supporting one site or the other, I am a member of both, and support both.
What happens to one will likely happen to the other, so dont try sink one and float another, it will just mean our whole community is worse off.
Finaly there will always be people sprouting ridiculous cr@p from their mouths. Sh1t happens, and in some of us it just happens a lot more.
Torrent sites in SA are fighting back. Be proud and be happy. Leave the personaly stuff somewhere else.
You’re one strange fella h33t.
Jeeva u useless bitch, i still dont like u!
Did I meantion that TPB sucks dogs balls?
Roze
dear Roze,
please die,
with sincerity and kindness, Anonymous.
55 – It happens all too often.
@13
yes they got static electricity. :)
Why does everyone hate me here now? I’m certainly a wit and really stimulating in my postings, why?
Roze
Hey guys;
I need to do to all of you a confession:
I am a retarded, and all of my comments reflect my intense degree of mental retardation…
Sorry for that… my comments are very annoying and boring…
http://www.h33t.com –> The place where the mental retardation is a constant…
geeze, if you use my nick to post a reply, at least say something useful.
not shit like “I love being kicked in the nuts.”
At least I’ve got nuts, yours were stolen by that chimpanzee mother you were shat out of.. or was that negro?
lol its funny how some people just cant get a clue on exactly whats going on here.. you realize your fighting yourself right? you realize this is all fake nonsense, and you are fighting imaginary people.
That being said.. on with it!
My name is Jeeva, I love it in the rump, please take a dump on me, then you can pump me, you know you gotta love me, and touch me, and f*ck me.. yeeaaaahhh.
That lawyer is a boss ;)
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