Recording Industry Takes Down BitTorrent & NZB Sites
Written by enigmax on November 06, 2008Although many stories about anti-piracy activity seem to come out of the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia, operations are certainly not limited to these countries. Today, news is filtering through that South Africa’s biggest BitTorrent and Usenet NZB sites have been taken down by the recording industry.
According to reports received today, two South African BitTorrent trackers have fallen to anti-piracy action. BitFarm.co.za was the largest tracker in the country with more than 10,000 members but that site has been closed along with a smaller private tracker known as NinjaCentral. Furthermore, BitFarm’s sister site, NewsHost, which specializes in Usenet indexing via .NZB files, is also receiving unwanted attention.
The legal threats emanate from the country’s equivalent of the RIAA, the Recording Industry of South Africa, otherwise known as RiSA. Instead of targeting the individual sites directly, it seems RiSA notified South Africa’s ISPA (an industry group for ISPs) who accepted the complaints.
In their complaint about NewsHost, RiSA stated that the site was an “invite only piracy-centric NZB site” offering over 12,300 NZB files. RiSA states that the site “contravenes Section 27 (1) (b) of the Copyright Act 98/1978 through the facilitation of piracy”, even though this section doesn’t mention facilitation directly:
27. (1) Any person who at a time when copyright subsists in a work, without the authority of the owner of the copyright
(b) sells or lets for hire or by way of trade offers or exposes for sale or hire;
ISPA accepted the complaints and contacted the ISPs hosting the BitTorrent and NZB sites. Part of their correspondence to the ISPs is listed below:
ISPA recently received the attached take-down request, targeted at your organisation. Acting as your appointed agent, we have reviewed the complaint and in our opinion it is a valid complaint which meets all of the legal requirements of the Electronic Communications and Transactions
(ECT) Act. The limitations on liability of service providers for content granted by Chapter XI of the ECT Act require that you remove or disable access to the data concerned upon receipt of a take-down notification. We therefore request that you respond expeditiously to this notice.
Although the BitFarm and NinjaCentral sites are down right now, RiSA also demanded that NewsHost’s domain name should be blocked, but the site is still partly accessible (but it continually tries to pull data from BitFarm, which is down) and displays an unusual note on the homepage:
In the meantime, lawyer Reinhardt Buys from Buys Inc. Attorneys who has previous experience of defending against RiSA has offered to represent the sites free of charge.
Reinhardt told TorrentFreak: “Sites that collect, index and host so-called torrents are legal in South Africa – the content of such sites is not only protected by the constitutional right to free speech, but is also outside the scope of any copyright claims.”
Noting that the sites in question do not host any actual copyrighted content but simply metafiles which link to the location of material hosted elsewhere, Reinhardt explains that sites such as these are similar to The Pirate Bay whose content in turn can be easily found using another search engine - called Google.
“A site like The Pirate Bay can never be liable for direct and criminal copyright infringement because it simply does not copy, share and distribute copyrighted material. The person using a torrent to download a file is the guilty party and not the publisher of the torrent,” he explained. The only liability left for a site like TPB would be under ‘contributory infringement’.
Reinhardt explained that there three types of copyright infringement under the South African Copyright Act 98 of 1978.
- Direct infringement – copying and using a copyrighted file without permission
- Criminal infringement – selling and distributing copies of copyrighted files
- Contributory infringement – materially contributing to either of the above forms of infringement.
“The courts have developed a nice test to determine whether a technology, tool or action amounts to contributory infringement and that is the so-called ‘but for’ test,” says Reinhardt, “i.e. will the P2P sharing of copyrighted files be taking place but for the existence of The Pirate Bay? This test was developed to protect innovative technologies such as CD burners, recorders and the like.”
“The answer is, absolutely not. Even without sites like The Pirate Bay, P2P file sharing would be possible. So, The Pirate Bay can never be guilty of contributory infringement.” Based on Reinhardt’s comments, ISPA may have taken down the sites prematurely. At this point it is unclear whether the sites will take the case to court, but if they do, they certainly have a chance to win.
Previously: TorrentFreak TV Episode 2
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82 Responses
BITFARM FTW!!!!!! WE WILL TRIUMPH!!!!!!!
When will they learn they cant stop sharing. They might see this as a big step for them but they lost the battle a long time ago.
Visit P2P Tech Time
http://www.p2ptechtime.com
God dammit! I hate it when people close down such good sites! I was a member it was a very good site now its just bugered up!
Hmmm, this is interesting and unwanted news.
Newzbin - the largest and absolute best NZB indexing site (261,000+ NZB’s currently) - has also had a case mounted against it as I understand it. Certainly there is legal action afoot in any case.
I’m a bit of a “jack-of-all-trades” when it comes to downloading my content: torrents are just one method I use. I mainly use Usenet, BT, Filehosters (Rapidshare etc.) and XDCC. By far the best method is Usenet - it’s blazingly fast (as fast as my internet can download) regardless of file or age, content is there as fast or faster than the best scene trackers, its secure because theres no chance of getting nabbed by MPAA and the like and of course there’s no pesky ratio to worry about.
Newzbin have sworn to fight all the way. I sure hope they do as Usenet is by far the best way of getting files, easily worth the 10-25 USD cost.
Seriously, the few times I’m forced to use a public tracker for hard to find content I’m just appalled because it’s so, so slow.
RIP Ninjacentral! It was a great site.
Thank you for running this story!
Everything is spot on and factual - nicely done! Although NewsHost does not “pull info from BitFarm” by the way. BitFarm and NewsHost are 2 seperate sites. BitFarm for torrents and NewsHost for NZBs. The weird message on the NewsHost homepage is just to scare away n00bz. The real site is only visible after you log in - but the NZBs have all been removed.
Have to disagree with #6, this news is quite newsworthy. You also do not understand the situation in South Africa at all mate. We are forced to use local/internal bandwidth because international bandwidth is about 10 times more expensive. These local sites are our only way to obtain content that you can just ‘easily’ download from your “jack-of-all-trades” sources.
Cheers
lol what a horribly inaccurate article?
10000 users on bitfarm??!?!?
Bitfarm had the majority of the leeches in the community.everyone knows they are No 2 and will always be no 2 despite their illusions of grandeur.
Haha, I just came to this site to submit this story! For a few nows people have been relying on Ninjacentral as a torrent srevice, and it has grown to a very large invite-only community. We as South Africans relied on local torrent and nzb sites as someone mentioned before, local bandwidth is a lot cheaper here. For $15 you can either get 30gb of local bandwidth, or 2gb of international bandwidth. And secondly, Newshost did not pull nzbs from Bitfarm, they were separate. Newshost was bought by Bitfarm.
BitFarm will win!!
Still wonder who started this
“illusions of grandeur” ????
@6 : “Have to disagree with #6, this news is quite newsworthy.”
If you’re talking about me, I never said anything about this not being newsworthy and neither is that my opinion.
I was pointing out that anoother NZB host is facing a legal challenge is all :\
I’m curious - you bring up the point about bandwidth - how is this a problem with usenet? NZB’s are such tiny files so it cant be those - where are the news servers you South African guys use located? Are they with your ISP - or international. To really get the best ut of usenet you need a premium provider like Giganews or Newshosting and I know they do not have servers in SA.
To reply to #12: If you are capped, you cannot browse international nzb sites to download the nzbs - this is where Newshost came in. Secondly, it provided a service of letting people know which files were cached. When someone downloaded a file, a person who followed soon after would get much fasters speeds as the files would already be on the South African servers.
We have two servers provided by SAIX and IS, but they are both very unstable as we do not pay a separate fee for them.
If you have any other questions, I’ll be here all day :D
I think its about high time someone put these morons from the “recording industry” in their place!
Jass
http://www.anonymity.cz.tc
Copyright infringement is illegal and consequently punishable.
Bit torrent sites not only contribute, but are clearly central to the scope of the lawbreaking.
Ergo, bit torrent sites are partially accountable under the law.
Is there a legitimate defense for the willfully compromised ethics of copyright infringement?
We’re waiting. There has not been one expressed, as yet.
Ergo, lobby to change the law or….. break it, be caught and be punished. Simple.
@15
Indeed, some action must be taken against them, personally, economically, and politically. It must be a total war against them. Attack the RiSA on every front!
Roze
http://www.10ch.org/
Oops, I farted, pardon me.
On the lighter side, it surprises me that Africa would do such a thing like this. Being multicultural and stuff this shouldn’t be banned.
@13 : I see… so ISP actually block foreign sites? That is very harsh.
@18
Indeed, file-sharing websites are a great way for completely free exchange of culture. The RiSA just want to crush this freedom. I would guess that they derive their power from the RIAA, since I think that they hold sway only because of the United States. Well, that is just my guess, so if it is true, then more action must be taken against the RIAA than ever.
Roze
eggorists FIRE
SPLAT
/END.SARCASM
@13 : I see… so ISP actually block foreign sites? That is very harsh.
No, this is not what happens. I’ll put this in the most simple way I can. You are able to purchase accounts that have international, and when you reach your cap, you fall back onto a ’soft-capped’ account where you can only access South African sites. To browse international sites again, you must purchase more international bandwidth. Hopefully that makes sense?
On the lighter side, it surprises me that Africa would do such a thing like this. Being multicultural and stuff this shouldn’t be banned.
What????
so what your saying is you didn’t learn anything from yesterdays little lesson about the IFPI guy who was gunned down. Stop messing around you cant stop sharing.
South Africa Bandwidth Costs:
2GB Int with 28GB Local (The first 2GB of traffic counts towards int / local) @ $15
10GB Int with 20GB Local (The first 2GB of traffic counts towards int / local) @ $60
1mb Uncapped Int ADSL @ $285
Our fastest ADSL connection is also only 4mb/512kb with most users only having 384kb/128kb lines with only 30GB of local cap for the month.
BF forever,they’ll have to take down us so called 10 000(ROFL) users to stop sharing;
i think that the person that reported this did so because of the admins on BF… they are sooo S***!!, they just bann people soo quickly!!!!, although i must say that the menbers are soo awsum tho!!! but i still say.. Bitfarm & Ninjacentral, FTW!!!!!
The writer of that article had his facts wrong. The 10k users, is all 3 sites combined. Namely Bitfarm, Newshost and Ninjacentral.
Bitfarm alone has about 4200 users.
@Rabbitdog.
I get 30gb International cap for $15 :D … your misinformed :p
although… my way isn’t totally on the up and up.
South African internet is really pathetic and EXTREMELY expensive…
The local sites helped a lot when it came to getting things. There would always be a user who would be willing and able to help another as most of the time a lot of us dont have international cap/bandwidth so we can only browse local sites (sites that are hosted here in South Africa and use South African bandwidth) so even small applications such as uTorrent we cant get, drivers too, information on sites that arent hosted locally.
If a user needed something off an international site there would always be a user who is able to and willing to help that user get what they want/need and host it locally.
I find nothing wrong or illegal with any of the 3 above mensioned sites as they are only indexing the content and not actually hosting it.
I find what RiSA asked is rather unfair! Lets wait and see what happens.
BITFARM!!!!!!FTW
Newshost and Bitfarm will rise again…
Typical of south africans to fight against each other… Who’s the best… BF or NC… Who cares! At the moment there’s nothing. Stand together and help to get the local sites back up and running, thats what everyone wants isn’t it?
31
Couldnt have said it better
+1000
Risa is protecting the rights, (trying too), of a very small group of exclusive Afrikaans artists.
They are so bad, I don’t even think one of there songs ever appeared on the sites.
More than 90 % of the content was TV series. Now a Music rights organization wants to shut it down?
I also cant believe the ISP ’s in South Africa are not standing up for the consumers, yes 10,000 customers will no longer need the 30 Gig local bandwidth, there is nothing in South Africa to use it on.NO streaming videos, nothing.
Who uses 30 gigs to browse the piss poor sites in SA, and read a couple of e-mails?
A lot of accounts are now being canceled, just because the ISP;s don’t have the balls to protect there paying customers.
Btw, IF I am in need of Afrikaans music, I will make sure that artist does not belong to Risa, if he/she does, I will NOT buy it, I will rip it.
Lets see the financial gain Risa gets out of that.
SA torrents will rise again. RISA cannot win…
If the pirate bay can run, so can we!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I really couldn’t give a rats @ss for RISA’s music / artists / cr@p. I want the TV Shows they don’t bother 2 bring 2 South Africa. I need Heroes, The Office, How I met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Terminator, Prison Break, True Blood, Merlin, Californication, …. !!!!!
Why should we as South Africans just miss out on all the good show cause they not interested in showing them locally when they are released / at all.
Man, SA sounds like it sucks for fans of downloading copyrighted content :(
@no1.
BITFARM KI<KS ASS!!! WE WILL BE BACK!!!! :br:
This is great news!
“so what your saying is you didn’t learn anything from yesterdays little lesson about the IFPI guy who was gunned down. Stop messing around you cant stop sharing.”
that guy wasn’t stopping sharing, he was stopping selling pirated stuff.
Well guys you know the guys that work at RISA are most likely the same little tards beaten up in school for ratting everything out - there has to be scum in the world for us to appreciate the good
@16: Reasoned Mind - you utter ignoramous fool, this argument has been over done but i shall humour your poor excuse for a response anyway - if record companies make media more affordable there would be no need for piracy. Hmmmm pooor old little artists it’s hard to drive a year old bently. Now go crawl under the rock you came from and stop bothering those with enough intellect to know what’s not right in peace.
I have said my bit.
10,000 torrent and nzb users have no use for their local only 30 gig accounts, @ an average price of R150.00 per contract, the ISp’s are going to be out of pockets close to 1 million five hundred thousand rand, a month.
I hope they can afford to loose that kind of revenue, and not pass it on the the rest of the consumers, I cannot see them loosing that amount of money for a long time, something has to give.
WAKE UP ISP;s, you are killing everyone, and yourself by not backing up your consumers!!
Bitfarm Rulez
We will always be some where :-)
@26 no one will get banned unfairly off Bf. guess you must have done somethign wrong if you got banned.
W T F ??
africa does have internet?
black people doesnt deserve to download anything imo
BLA’CK PEOPLE doesnt deserve to have internet !!!!!!
Look who is the idiot here, if you think Africa has only blacks, than we in Africa must hen think USa is only spiks and indians.
Thanks for showing us here your level of education, u moron.
There is millions of white and other races living in Africa, Specially South Africa.
Your incest conception by your Hillbilly parents is showing.
Go away, this aint te Jerry Springer show.
@ 41 i would say that every1 of those 10 000 users have at least 2 or 3 accounts.
The ISPs wont miss this business at all, infact they will be glad. These downloaders abuse their services.
anyway, we all know this day had to come, the guys are risa are only doing their job.
i am confident, that in a few months time everyone will be downloading happily again.
Good luck to Bitfarm, even if they dont come out on top of this, they will still remain a great community of ppl and im sure they will remain that way.
“Bit torrent sites not only contribute, but are clearly central to the scope of the lawbreaking.”
To quote Dan Aykroyd… Jane, you ignorant slut.
BitTorrent sites are legal under South African law, and exempt from cotributory infringement charges. Reinhardt Buy explained this clearly, but apparently it flew right over your widdle head. I guess he should have explained it via handpuppets for the benefit of retards like you.
And SINCE BitTorrent sites are legal in South Africa, the closure of Bitfarm and Ninjacentral will be shortlived to say the least.
“Ergo, lobby to change the law or….. break it, be caught and be punished. Simple.”
Kid, I lol at your immense stupidity.
Out of the total estimated number of filesharers, significantly less than 0% are “caught and punished” anually. Infact, if I had to ballpark it, I’d say the total number of filesharers “caught and punished” in the entire history of filesharing is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.0001%. But even that is probably being far too generous.
BTW, I’m kind of a stickler for truth in advertising, so calling yourself “Reasoned Mind” doesn’t sit very well with me. For the sake of accuracy, I’m going to call you “Supreme Dipshit” from now on.
we will find a way to survive, never fear farmers!
5 & 46, thats exactly the kind of uninformed, bigoted, racist garbage that makes our global society so fu|<ed up.
People like u deserve to be culled!
Dont u have a date with your sister to get to, take her to McD’s and u may get some action!
Does this have anything to do with all the torrent-sites disappearing from torrentz.com?
I am LMAO at all the comments
Who needs Commedy to download
just read this
If only South Africa had Affordable Uncapped Internet
more missed news
the real news is anti-piracy agencies mistakenly cause the takedown of legitimate filesharing sites in SA
the wronged site operators are taking action and their sites will be restored asap at the cost of the anti-p2p agencies
http://www.torrentfreak.com who is anti-p2p
Please take down a new site called Google.com, for indexing torrent files, on the exact same grounds.
I don’t see the difference, except that torrent sites don’t index anything else than torrents. Why does Google get away with this then, if it is so illegal?
this is the best news I have heard in a while.
@Newshost.za.net Member, about it pulling info from BF, it is correct. If i remember right I linked the logo’s on the main page of both BF and NH to one source.
damn 46, what a mouth full ! i agree with what you said, read recent government gazets. there has never been even 1 case were a torrent site in South-Africa has been successfully prosecuted.
The nice thing is the admins of the local torrent sites all get along and know each other. though the members don’t but hey who cares ! the important thing now is we have to fight these mothers, that forced the the wrongful take-down notice of BitFarm, NewsHost and Ninja !
“If only South Africa had Affordable Uncapped Internet”
@52 never gonna happen
If there is a chance of this happening, I would not expect it in the next 5 years
local Torrent sites is not just a torrent connection but rather it has become local communities, where people share more than just what they have !! haha
i agree with PsyCLown fully, because of very expensive bandwidth in SA many are forced to using local which is many ways a fraction of the cost. also only local uncapped is really affordable as the cheapest international bandwidth is no less than $250p/m as to local uncapped is no more than $15p/m.
26 don’t agree with you!! The mods admin & sys-ops of all 3 sites are all cool ppl ! and we never just ban ppl, we love the member’s and the whole local community. you do sound like one of those Hit & runners or more appropriate blood sucker who leech and leech the whole community dry! these ppl get banned and it wouldn’t be a complete surprise if it was a Risa employee who was a member and got banned from BF NC for not obeying stupid ass 5year old rulez
@54 said: “Please take down a new site called Google.com, for indexing torrent files, on the exact same grounds.
I don’t see the difference,…”
The difference is that Google links to the page content and not torrent files directly (using normal searches). And Google isn’t new. You, sir, are a massive, stupid fucking moron whose claim to fame is being thinking your very smart but but not realising taht everyone else thinks you retard. I hope you get shot you stupid dipshit, we need to keep the gene pool pure.
Its true, we only have about 4.5K+ members on BF, but we also have the 10K users from newshost, as we hosted both sites from the same servers.
Funnily enough, Both sites were actually profitable for the ISP’s in south africa, not only in buying there bandwidth, but a great number of the fastest lines in south africa were bought just for BF and NH…
We will have our day in court though… BF will be back.
@60, ur a perfect example of one of those little nerds sitting behind a screen in a dark room all day trying to find people to flame to make you feel better about yourself becuase u cant get a chick(or guy for that matter).
If you had half a brain you would realise that he was being SARCASTIC about it being new. Im pretty sure most people know what Google is, and that its not new.
Although its technically different, it is a similair concept - an indexer.
Now run along and go play with your mom…oh wait…she doesnt love you either.
You guys should’ve never downloaded that Kurt Darren cd. :)
LOL @63 that’s just wrong mkaayyy.. :)fact of the matter is that these guys don’t have any say and can’t do anything really. The law will not help them.. Sad pathetic morons - yes RISA idiots I am talking to you - someone above stated cleaning the gene pool - i suggest they start with you
I wonder how much money these parasitic torrent operators make off their ad revenue…
To 65. nothing, no ads on the site, its a community of friends.
65<— just for your info you obviously don’t know sh|t, BitFarm and NewsHost is as Bull said non profitable! there is no donations, no membership fees, no advertisements, nothing just 100% free.
In Fact recently found out what was the Running costs of these 2 sites, trust me if the sites closed down the owner can go buy himself a Bugatti Veyron, until then he will be riding a Bicycle… :-P
“The difference is that Google links to the page content and not torrent files directly (using normal searches).”
If linking to .torrent files which point to copyrighted content is illegal, then Google is just as guilty as The Pirate Bay, because Google links to millions of .torrent files through its own search index.
Or don’t you understand what the term “linking” means?
I get the impression that you don’t.
Your info is a little inaccurate.
Bitfarm has just over 4200 registered users not 10 000 as stated in the post!
all you guys are a bunch of idiots(i am referring to ppl like 65 and 69)
The fact is: 3 TOTALLY FREE sites have been taken down for a bunch of crappy SA bands? Gimme a break, this is ridiculous.
I hope the guy that reported this will have a slow and painful death as well as the RiSA who panicked because there were a few torrents with SA music and thought they had to do something - really pathetic.
nuff said
That is an extremely interesting and informative article, thank you for taking the time to write it
Kurt Darren FTW!!!!
We r doing nothing wrong… Viva la Buys…. Viva… Bitfarm will survive…
Thank you RiSA for stuffing things up.
Why don’t you catch a wake up and realize that basically no one buys music CD’s any more. CD’s are so out of date and they are too expensive. Usually CD’s have at most 1 or 2 good songs on them, people are not going to pay much for that, if you sold your CD’s at reasonable prices people would have bought them. Now your solution is to piss off your target market, good going. I don’t think you are going to benefit in any way by this but you can say good bye to +-10000 potential customers (mostly educated, financially independent young people), in SA that’s a large portion of your target market gone.
As for the idiot who ratted and bust everyone, i would lay really low bro.
BTW, the admin of Bitfarm were really cool and really went out of their way to help LAN gaming, online gaming and poor people struggling with little to no bandwidth, they did it for all those who were worthy. In my experience they only banned idiots who deserved to be banned.
Too the admins of Bitfarm and Newshost I just want to say thank you for everything you did, you had the balls that others lacked, you helped a community for a long time, it won’t be forgotten.
We all need to lay low for a while and don’t be stupid we are being watched, they’ll try go for individuals now.
Risa just might have made the wrong decision buy trying to take down the sites. they cause them to loose their hosting at their ISP and if this is over and the ISPs dont want their sites on them then they are going to pay big time so solve it.
Its currently running from a adsl line, not so much fun at all.
There must be some F@ggot who just want to shut torrents site down using the lame tatic that was used on Demonoid (remember they also got the very same music tune few months ago in Canada!)
To those leechers, hit-and-runner who get banned form the torrent admins and crying you sad faces in front of RISA , Go F**k yourself!
and just for a record, There were NO music of any kind ever being shared in da Ninja site.
NewsHost and Bitfarm back to stay !!!
Our land-line service provider in South Africa basically has a monopoly on Dsl.
They subsequently charge obscene amounts.
Even if u have an uncapped account to access international sites, u can only download maybe 20 gigs or so and then they reduce the speed of ur line to 512k speeds, with our max access speeds currently set at 4Mbps.
It is expensive to buy international access per gig(approx US$7), but it is much cheaper to buy local bandwith per gig(approx US$0.50). Our only real access to content is via the unrealiable local news servers or the more reliable local torrent sites we have (ie. bitfarm and ninjacentral)
@47
” The ISPs wont miss this business at all, infact they will be glad. These downloaders abuse their services”
It is not like international ISPs where they use their “OWN” bandwidth. We only got 2-3 1st TIER ISPs that doesn’t deal direct with the public. They resell via vISP’s. So the more bandwidth people buy from vISP’s, the more money they make, since they ofcourse take a cut for profit.
@44
“W T F ??, africa does have internet? black people doesnt deserve to download anything imo”
South Africa != Africa. The internet takes to long to download anyway, in that time the blacks die from AIDS.
A lot of whites & pro-whites here!.
The old republic flag will fly before 2010!
ROFL at previous post… Not all south africans are like this. Much like the south of USA is alot diff from LA for example. These sites are up and running again BTW
Supporting bitfarm to the end!!!! Long Live Bitfarm!
For every one they take down, another takes it’s place. When will they ever learn that 2+2 = 10 new P2P sites took it place.
http://www.aquariumfish.me
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