Having lost its legal battle with the MPA in March 2010, in May it collapsed under a mountain of debt, only to resurrected under new management as Newzbin2.

The site has gone about its business ever since, continuing in pretty much the same manner as it did before the closure and indexing the same content – including Hollywood movies. One would think, therefore, that in common with dozens of torrent sites, file-hosting services and even search engines like Google, Newzbin2 would be overwhelmed with DMCA takedown requests. Not so, says Mr White of Team R Dogs, the group behind the site.

“Oddly we seem to get very few DMCA notices and when we contact the sender we are ignored. I’ve sent any number of email replies to email addresses which state ‘we monitor this email account’ only to receive no reply,” Mr White told TorrentFreak. “Why, it’s almost as if they are just sending them without caring if anything is done.”

Since the DMCA takedown notice is one of the most powerful weapons for removing content, or in the case of Newzbin2 mere links to content on the Internet, it’s strange that the site doesn’t get many. Even more so when the site, in Usenet terms, is Hollywood enemy #1. So are the MPA interested at all?

“We’ve had /one/ DMCA notice since December & even that wasn’t from the Hollywood Dirty Half Dozen but a software maker,” Mr White explained. “We emailed them and they totally blanked us. We’d be perfectly happy to take it down if they’d identified the posts.”

Of course, while DMCA notices can be a useful tool, they’re by no means the only one available to use against file-sharing sites. Currently the MPA are locking horns with ISP BT in the UK in an attempt to have Newzbin2 blocked there.

“The MPA’s lame attempt at censoring us in the UK won’t be permitted to cut Brits off from us if it happens,” insists Mr White.

However, with the recent domain seizures in the US ringing in everyone’s ears – not least the operators of Newzbin2 – there may be a more direct way of reducing traffic to the site on a worldwide basis, but Team R Dogs don’t appear too concerned.

“We are making sure that the site is going to be around for the long haul. Given the shenanigans of the US government, with its unlawful domain seizure project, we may need to change domains to non-US ones: we have solutions for that in place, with backup domains,” Mr White assured us.

With the future in mind, Mr White told TorrentFreak that there are plans to upgrade the site to make it more reliable and improve coverage of Usenet content.

“While we have backup servers and databases in several global locations we plan to migrate systems to fully distributed & redundant global databases & webservers so that any one server going AWOL won’t bring the site down, or even need backups to be brought manually online.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

That news was quickly followed by the revelation from an ex-director of Newzbin that the site’s domain names had been sold to a Seychelles-based company in order to clear debts. A couple of days ago the company, WCIS Limited, told TorrentFreak they did not wish to tell us about their intentions for the domains.

Run by an ex-Newzbin editor, the DeepSharer blog has now managed to secure an interview with Team R Dogs boss Mr White. Here are the main points, plus those from the later Q & A.

After reiterating that they are nothing to do with the original Newzbin staff, Mr White said that since they already had the Newzbin code, bringing the site back after their legal problems was just the opportune thing to do.

At least to begin, the site will be a “straight clone” of the old site, but a redesign is on the agenda. This process could carried out with the help of users who could be asked to vote on the inclusion of new features. There is even talk of adding non-Usenet search features such as BitTorrent and Rapidshare. And the porn will return on Newzxxx too.

As for retention, the aim is to reach at least 400 days as soon as possible and then move to 600+ days within 9 months from launch.

So will ex-users of Newzbin return to the site? Team R Dogs certainly hope so as they say the whole thing is costing a fortune and quite frankly, they need the money.

“I have personally signed cheques for an $22,000 Sun server and 2 x $9,000 Sun servers to help run this site and I expect to sign more. I have hired a fulltime coder on good salary, I am recruiting another expensive geek to keep the site up,” explains Mr White.

Although the site will probably launch for free for a week or two, the site will revert to a pay venue.

“Let me be clear. We have a profit motive in this. We haven’t tried to ‘steal’ from Newzbin1 guys – they got shutdown by the MPA, not by us. The MPA have given us an opportunity to make money. Thanks MPA,” he continues.

“Does this mean we intend to shit on users & ex-Newzbin1 members? Fuck no. We want to provide a good service and take the same profits the Newzbin1 guys did. Yea sure we are using their works to do so but they have abandoned their works and they have SAID so themselves. There is no moral ambiguity here: they have dropped out of the scene and we are replacing them.”

Part of the support for ex-members will be the continuation of any credit they had on the site, although how far back that will go will remain to be seen. For those adding new credit, a 3rd party payment system will be used.

But let’s not forget about the fate of Newzbin at the hands of the MPA – how will Team R Dogs fend off that inevitable attack?

“We’ll just do a Piratebay on them,” they say. “We can run faster than them and shapeshift.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.