Notable among them are Google, Microsoft and Amazon (for providing search engine results) and Mastercard, Visa and CCBill for providing payment services for allegedly infringing sites. Private settlement with Amazon aside, most of this legal action was a complete failure.

Undeterred, in 2009 Perfect 10 went after cyberlocker giant RapidShare, claiming that the company was infringing its copyrights by having Perfect 10′s images on its servers. That case failed too and RapidShare countersued.

With one failed file-hosting lawsuit behind them, this year Perfect 10 went after another – MegaUpload – and with the ink barely dry on that lawsuit, the company is getting even more adventurous.

As spotted by Slyck, Perfect 10 have now sued Giganews, one the world’s leading Usenet providers. Also in their sights are a number of Giganews resellers under the umbrella of LiveWire Services Inc. Perfect 10 is throwing a number of allegations at the companies including copyright and trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Perfect 10 describes Giganews as a company operating “virtual warehouses containing billions of dollars worth of copyrighted works” including “pirated movies, songs, images [and] computer programs.”

Furthermore, Giganews is accused of inducing and assisting others to infringe copyright and of selling illegal content to LiveWire and associates including rhinonewsgroups.com, powerusenet.com, infinityusenet.com, eurousenet.com, galacticgroups.com, cheapnewsgroups.com, fastusenet.com, usenetgiant.com, and usenet.net.

“Defendants are also aware that the USENET no longer has any significant legitimate application and virtually all of the activity on the USENET involves the authorized copying and distribution of infringing materials,” Perfect 10 allege.

“Defendants have in total, copied, distributed, displayed, and sold, more than 165,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images – roughly 15,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images per website.”

It would not be a surprise if Perfect 10′s images were to be found on the worldwide Usenet system, but providing Giganews complies with correctly formatted DMCA takedown requests, the company has protection under the law. “Correctly formatted” appear to be the key words here.

Perfect 10 says that on March 25th 2009, it sent Giganews “800 Perfect 10 copyrighted images, a number of which displayed Perfect 10 copyright notices”. Apparently, Giganews wrote back explaining that they could not find the images in question based on the information in the notice, a claim that Perfect 10 refutes.

“Giganews could have found each and every one of those images by using its own search function to search for the image identifiers provided with Perfect 10’s notice,” say Perfect 10 in their lawsuit.

“Once it found an infringing Perfect 10 image in a particular group of such images (called an “article”), it could have blocked other Perfect 10 images displaying Perfect 10 copyright notices in that same group, but failed to do so,” the complaint adds. This appears to be a reference to some kind of proactive deletion work Perfect 10 required of Giganews.

TorrentFreak has it on good authority that Giganews does in fact comply with many rightsholders and takes down content quickly once it has received a correctly formatted DMCA complaint. One of the things they ask for is a so-called ‘Message-ID’, which in basic terms is equivalent to a URL on the worldwide web. Giganews even provide a template for takedown requests, which can be found here.

In their complaint Perfect 10 seem to suggest that by providing a DMCA complaint in the form of an actual image, it’s then the responsibility of Giganews to search for the items on Usenet in order to remove them. Interestingly, in their 2010 legal action against RapdShare it transpired that Perfect 10 had failed to provide precise locations for allegedly infringing content in their takedown notices, a factor which helped them lose the case.

After multiple attempts and failures in similar lawsuits, Perfect 10 will be hoping that Einstein was wrong all along and that progress against Giganews will net them a jury trial and the cool $25 million they’re claiming.

Source: Never Give Up: Perfect 10 Sues Giganews Usenet Service

In July 2009 the recording industry chalked up a significant legal win against Usenet.com. A judge ruled that the company had engaged in direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and induced others to infringe. Their actions were deemed significant enough to disallow the Usenet provider its rights to ‘safe harbor’ under the DMCA, a very dangerous situation indeed.

Just yesterday the newsgroup world received a further reminder of the legal spotlight tracking their movements as Usenet indexer Newzbin went into liquidation after a ruinous battle with several Hollywood movie studios.

It is therefore entirely appropriate for Usenet-related businesses to stay on both the right side of the law and the incredibly powerful entities who are ready to pounce should they stray off the straight and narrow. Make no mistake, the consequences for missteps can be severe, but one provider seems to have taken its caution just a little too far.

The folks over at Unzbin.com have been beavering away in recent months to make an NZB client that they hope will become the uTorrent of the newsgroups. The Unzbin client is very compact and since receiving a great review at the start of April has been refined further still. But unfortunately they’ve had a little problem in recent days.

At the end of March, Unzbin opened an affiliate account with Giganews, one of the world’s leading Usenet providers. Everything ran fine until a couple of days ago when Unzbin received an email warning – not from the MPAA, but from Giganews.

This letter shall serve as written notice that you are in material breach of the Giganews Terms and Conditions Agreement (“Agreement” or “Terms”) you entered into on March 31, 2010. In Section 3. 2. of the Agreement you represented and warranted that your website(s) would “not contain, display or in any other way communicate any inappropriate or illegal information as determined by Giganews in its sole and unfettered discretion”.

The web pages located at: http://www.unzbin.com/screenshots & http://www.unzbin.com contains instructions on how to illegally download copyrighted material, which is inappropriate or illegal information.

This inappropriate or illegal content found on your website(s) must be removed within a week of the date of this letter. Failure to remove all such content by this date may result in immediate termination of the Agreement in accordance with Section 5.2 of the Terms. We take the intellectual property rights of others very seriously and we encourage all of our Affiliates and Referral Sites to do the same. If you have any questions about this notice or the Agreement in general, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,
Office of General Counsel
Giganews, Inc.

Naughty Unzbin, then? Sadly, not even close. Here is the “copyright infringing” screenshot in question.

Free and legal to download movie. Check. Free and legal to download software. Check. Clearly there has been some sort of mistake then? Apparently not.

Unzbin later received a more personal email from a Giganews Affiliate Manager who explained the problem in more detail but only succeeding in creating more confusion.

Regarding the notice that was just sent to you, there is only one concern on your site, which is the prominence of the example “Steal This Film” in various screenshots of the program being used on the site.

As you know, we can’t control and monitor everything that is uploaded to Usenet, but we also don’t advertise the potential attainability of copyrighted materials and ask the same of all our affiliates. We do know that “Steal This Film” is a free documentary about file sharing and intellectual property, but to most people (and to legal entities), it will appear as instructional usage of your software.

The “Ubuntu” example is perfect, and I think that this is more than adequate in getting across the point of Unzbin’s functionality.

To say the least, Unzbin are very unimpressed with Giganews and expressed this clearly in their response.

As you may know “steal this film” is a documentary which is freely available. We’re not going to remove anything from our website and frankly I don’t understand why Giganews is meddling into our internal affairs. We run our project the way we want and that’s how it’s going to be. I think it’s a very bold and hypocritical move on your part!

And so we’re going to discontinue working with you guys, simply because we do believe in the freedom of speech and freedom of expression. We have no tolerance for nazi gestapo practices and threats (which don’t impress or scare me one bit).

Kind regards and a big FUCK YOU,

Unzbin!

“This is the second time I can recall that someone has been stupid enough to miss the joke of STEAL THIS FILM: that you *can’t* “steal” something that’s been offered to you willingly,” Jamie King, creator of Steal This Film told TorrentFreak.

“It kind of strains credulity that anyone could be so dumb, but there it is. Obviously we’re delighted Unzbin offer STEAL THIS FILM as a download example and doing so clearly doesn’t violate Giganews’ policies — asking for them to cease and desist amounts to nothing less than a freedom of speech violation,” he concludes.

TorrentFreak wrote to Giganews twice asking for a comment but we have received no response, which is a real shame but not really a surprise. Putting a foot wrong in today’s copyright climate could cost Giganews an absolute fortune and perhaps even their entire business so it is to be expected that they choose to err on the side of caution.

But come on guys….

Source: Giganews Lawyer Says Steal This Film Is An Illegal Download

This rapid increase in retention has left many NZB“>.NZB indexing sites behind, unable to handle holding data for such a long time.

However, Newzbin, one of the original Usenet indexing sites and creators of the .NZB format, is currently addressing this situation.

According to Caesium, the administrator at Newzbin, their setup was designed years ago to handle 50 to 60 days retention but with various tweaks and modifications, they are able to squeeze just about 100 days from the equipment. Following the Giganews announcement, Caesium explained that Newzbin are working to upgrade their systems to handle the increased retention. “We are already making substantial monetary investment into new hardware to store the increased amount of data required to mirror this on Newzbin” he said in a post on the site.

New hardware is being bought and is “halfway in place” to not only match the 200 days offered by Giganews, but to better it by 150-200 days to an impressive 350 to 400 days retention.

Caesium continued, “Unfortunately buying, building, testing, and deploying this sort of hardware does not come quickly or cheaply, and we have no estimate as to when it will be complete.”

Newzbin is a premium site so those preferring to obtain their .nzb’s for free might consider sites such as Binsearch, who have an .nzb creator and offer around 158 days retention. Other free services include those from NZBIndex and NewzLeech.

Source: Major Upgrades at Newzbin to Accommodate Massive Usenet Retention