Instead, frustrated rightsholders – who believe that doing nothing against unauthorized file-sharing just isn’t an option – have been channeled into talks with ISPs to try and find a voluntary solution to the problem.

Today, and after years of wrangling, it now appears the sides have agreed terms on what will be known as Vcap – the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme.

The system will see the music and movie industries monitor BitTorrent file-sharing networks for infringement, logging pirates’ IP addresses as they go. These will be tracked back to ISPs who will send out a warning letter to the subscriber account associated with the alleged deed.

According to the BBC, only four ISPs – BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media – are currently signed up to the BPI and MPA scheme. Users of other ISPs won’t receive any letters for now but that could change in the future.

Unlike other “graduated response” schemes elsewhere in the world, the UK’s Vcap has no real “teeth”. Even though the language used in the letters will reportedly increase in tone, there will be no punishments, and after receipt of a fourth warning no account will receive a fifth.

On the privacy front subscribers will be pleased to know that within Vcap, ISPs won’t be handing their identities over to the music and movie companies. Rightsholder access to Vcap data will be limited to how many alerts have been sent out but since they are the ones generating the data for the warnings, the IP addresses of the alleged infringers will already be known to them.

The BPI and MPA will be pleased that a deal has been reached, but it has come at a cost. While the language used in the warnings will increase, threats or suggestions of consequences for continued infringement have been replaced by messages designed to educate. Also, warnings sent will be capped at 2.5 million over three years.

It will also come at a financial cost. The BBC reports that rightsholders will pay each ISP £750,000 to set up the system, or 75% of the costs, whichever is smaller. On top of this initial outlay the BPI and MPA will pay each ISP an additional annual sum of £75,000 to cover administration costs.

While the ISPs and industry groups have agreed terms, Vcap is not quite a done deal yet. As part of the scheme, ISPs hope to keep records for up to a year detailing which subscribers have received warning letters and how many each has received. On this issue they are awaiting approval from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

In the right circumstances and armed with a court order its certainly conceivable that not only the BPI and MPA could gain access to this data, but also outside companies with similar interests.

Finally, and despite the ‘gentle’ tone of Vcap, there is a sting in the tail. In the agreement seen by the BBC, rightsholders say that if Vcap doesn’t achieve results, they will call for the “rapid implementation” of the harsh measures promised by the Digital Economy Act.

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

In recent months the group has approached several site owners requesting them to take down their sites, or face legal action.

One way to identify the owners of said sites is through domain WHOIS information, which is publicly available. However, this becomes problematic when site owners use so-called domain privacy services, which hide their personal details from the public. At least, that’s what’s assumed.

As it turns out, not all of these services are as private as one might think. The operator of a linking site learned this the hard way when ‘Domains by Proxy‘ shared his personal details with the MPA.

The domain privacy service, which is owned by GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, handed over his personal details without a subpoena, or any form of due process.

“We have received a possible legal complaint regarding your domain name xxx.com,” Domains By Proxy informed the site owner.

“Since we were provided with proof the complainant owns a potentially applicable copyright, we have disclosed your identity for the limited purpose of this complaint so that the complainant can communicate directly with you to seek resolution.”

The site owner, who prefers to remain anonymous, was shocked when he received the message. He says his website doesn’t host any copyrighted material and assumed that Domains by Proxy would at least notify him before sharing any personal details.

Soon after the email from Domains by Proxy arrived, the Motion Picture Association reached out to the domain owner, using the name and email address provided by the domain privacy service.

“This Notice requires you to immediately take effective measures to end and prevent further copyright infringement. All opportunities provided by the Website to download, stream or otherwise obtain access to the Entertainment Content should be disabled permanently,” the movie industry group wrote.

“If you fail to take the immediately required action to end and prevent further copyright infringements the MPA and the MPA Members expressly reserve the right to pursue all remedies available,” MPA added.

MPA email

Needless to say, the domain owner does not agree with Domains by Proxy’s action. He says that the MPA obtained his personal details without providing actual proof. In addition, he doesn’t understand why his personal details had to be handed over, as all emails directed to the email listed in the WHOIS are forwarded to him anyway.

“Domain by Proxy automatically adds yourdomainname@domainbyproxy.com, so any organization can contact the domain owners directly. There is no need to ask personal details from the WHOIS service without any proof of copyright infringements,” the domain owner tells TF.

“Other web services, such as LeaseWeb, don’t give details directly to MPA but force you to disable the service instead. Domains by Proxy should do the same I think,” he adds.

TF reached out to Domains by Proxy for a comment on the situation, but the company hasn’t responded yet. With the slogan “your identity is nobody’s business but ours” it’s odd to see that they hand over private details of customers so easily, but those who read the company’s privacy policy can see that this is common practice.

“We will disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate to respond to claims and legal process, to protect our property and rights or the property and rights of a third-party,” the privacy policy reads.

As it turns out, Domains by Proxy is judge and jury here, while due process is completely absent. That’s not really an ideal policy for a company that trades on people’s privacy rights.

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

Indexing site Newzbin, the creator of the NZB format, was hugely popular with Usenet users and for this reason attracted the attention of the Motion Picture Association. After a ruinous High Court battle which left it massively indebted to the Hollywood studios, the site folded in May 2010.

Surprisingly, however, just weeks later the site reappeared as Newzbin2, its code apparently liberated by individuals known as Team R Dogs. The site immediately set about ruffling the feathers of Hollywood, actions which resulted in Newzbin2 becoming the first ever site to be blocked on copyright grounds in the UK.

Unable to maintain its funding the site eventually closed, but far from over the story is about to take a couple more unexpected twists. First off and according to the site’s former lawyer, Newzbin intends to make a comeback with new services designed to defeat NSA spying.

“We are horrified by the recently disclosed antics of the NSA in indiscriminately spying on all Internet users,” David Harris told TorrentFreak.

“We cut our teeth protecting our users from the surveillance of corrupt US corporations like the Hollywood movie studios. We now plan to bring a range of privacy services to help protect the public from governments. Our first product is a secure email service which is about to enter closed early beta testing.”

Now, the name David Harris may very well ring a couple of bells with readers. Harris was the original Newzbin’s lawyer, in fact for a while he defended the site in its High Court battle against the MPA.

However, that episode became mired controversy when it was discovered that not only was Harris the site’s lawyer, but he was also secretly the site’s owner having previously obtained 100% of the shares.

In 2012 the Bar Standards Board eventually disbarred Harris and fined him £2,500 after the Brighton-based barrister called MPA lawyers names including “prick” and “slimebag”. But 18 months later and Harris is now hoping to bring a new valuable service to the masses.

“Newzbin will be based in privacy protecting jurisdictions outside the territories of the United States & its cronies. Once out of Beta phase, it will be based in Switzerland,” Harris explains.

“We will not be complying with US National Security letters or government demands other than those from our host jurisdiction. Like Lavabit we will close rather than comply with orders violating our users’ privacy.”

Harris says that the new service, to be hosted at EncryptedMail.ch, is undergoing testing and should be available to the public by Christmas. However, despite the deaths of Newzbin and Newzbin2, there is still unfinished business with the MPA on the horizon.

“The MPA allege that Elsworth [former Newzbin creator and owner] & I dishonestly dissipated Newzbin’s assets in 2010 to avoid paying the MPA the £230,000 costs they were awarded after the 2010 trial. They say I did this by setting up offshore companies which I paid Newzbin’s remaining money into,” Harris explains.

“They allege that Elsworth and I, and maybe others, arranged the ‘theft’ of the source code & databases [of Newzbin] and then operated the Newzbin2 site and then infringed their copyrights. I deny that.”

Harris informs us that the MPA are claiming that he is none other than the infamous Mr White, the public face of Team R Dogs, the group behind Newzbin’s resurrection. To this end in late 2012 the MPA obtain injunctions against several of Harris’s companies which the former lawyer says were designed to put him out of business. Former Newzin owner Chris Elsworth has apparently settled with the MPA so will not be part of their action.

“Thus far the MPA have got me disbarred and killed my businesses but the email project is the start of my fightback,” Harris explains. “I intend to continue my fight to protect peoples’ privacy from governments. I also have other projects relating to p2p technology and Usenet in the formative stages.”

The MPA’s case against Harris is expected to go to trial in December 2013.

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

The site created the NZB format, in basic terms .torrent files for newsgroups, which massively simplified the downloading of files from Usenet. This new-found ease of use attracted many to the previously difficult and inaccessible system and helped to kick-start a wave of Usenet indexing sites.

The subsequent popularity of Newzbin was not appreciated by the MPA, who sued the site’s operators. The action proved ruinous and in May 2010 left the site with debts of anywhere between £500K and £700K, depending on whose estimates you believe.

But through all the misery came a ray of light for the site’s former users. Newzbin was to be resurrected by a team of hackers called Team R Dogs, of which Mr White was the most public-facing.

Although the site did come back as Newzbin2, things were not going to be easy. The MPA, who were stinging that the site they had killed had somehow reanimated, began legal action to have the site blocked at the ISP level in the UK.

After much wrangling, October 26 2011 Justice Arnold at the High Court handed down a written judgment to BT, one of the UK’s largest Internet service providers. It ordered the company to block subscriber access to Newzbin2 within two weeks.

Newzbin2 responded with an encrypted software client to circumvent the ban which did go some way to getting users back on the site, but the MPA still weren’t done and continued pressing for more ISP blocks.

In the end, all of the UK’s major Internet providers were blocking the site and with the growing threat of domain seizure, Newzbin2 took the decision to switch to a Spanish .es domain.

For months now the site has continued, albeit in a more subdued fashion, but behind the scenes things have not been running to plan.

“Our servers have been unstable and crashing on a regular basis meaning the NZBs & NFOs are unavailable for long periods and we don’t have the money to replace them,” the site said in a closure statement a few hours ago.

In addition to its computing power, Newzbin2 and its predecessor have always relied on human beings to find interesting files on Usenet and bring them to the attention of the site’s users. But perhaps understandably, the adverse news surrounding the site has driven these people away. After all, who wants to become shooting practice for the MPA?

When TorrentFreak spoke with Mr White after Team R Dogs first took over the site, he made something very clear to us – his team were reviving Newzbin, not for the fun of it, but for the money. But now, more than two years later, it appears that particular plan won’t come to fruition.

“The figures just don’t stack up. Newzbin1 was said to have had 700,000 registered users. In fact that was the total number of people who ever signed up in the history of Newzbin from 2000 onwards & only a fraction were active, loads of people dropped out & went to other sites,” Team R Dogs reveal.

“We reckon they had about 100,000 users and of those only a few 10′s of thousands paid premium topups. That still made good money for the Newzbin1 guys. We don’t have much more than about 40,000 active users and the number of premium users is in the small thousands. It costs much more to run than we bring in, it just doesn’t stack up,” they add.

Team R Dogs also say that bringing back Newzbin after it was taken down didn’t sit well with the conspiracy theorists who spread the rumor that the site was an MPA trap.

“That stung us bad and we never got the userbase back,” they say.

And the money woes don’t stop there. We’ve reported recently how all kinds of file-sharing sites and services have been experiencing problems with PayPal and other forms of payment processing, and apparently Newzbin2 have had extreme difficulties too. All of their payment providers have withdrawn their services and the site now reveals that there was also a fresh legal attack.

“The MPA sued Paypal and are going at our innocent payment provider Kthxbai Ltd in the UK. Our other payment provider has understandably lost their nerve. Result? We have no more payment providers to offer & no realistic means of taking money – no, Bitcoin isn’t credible as it’s just too hard for 90% of people,” Team R Dogs conclude.

In its farewell speech the site protests that it was always 100% DMCA compliant and has taken down content when asked to, but none of that would have been good enough for the MPA. They have spent a huge amount of money on both the current site and its predecessor and it was never likely they were simply going to forget about it.

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

Although BT had already lost their case opposing the action, there was a last-minute development when a Newzbin2 and BT user stepped up to intervene in the proceedings.

The individual, known only as “DM”, had already come under pressure from the MPA who, according to Newzbin2′s Mr White, had sent him a bill for “$10,000 in costs” along with a warning that the proceedings could bankrupt him.

Despite these efforts, DM’s application was heard yesterday. TorrentFreak understands that he asked that the full block on Newzbin2 should be avoided, and the MPA should specifically identify which URLs point to infringing material and have those removed instead.

“Congratulations to our user ‘DM’ for having the big clanging balls of steel to intervene on behalf of the users of Newzbin2. He did so in the teeth of desperate ferocious opposition by the MPA and wasn’t fazed by their spineless attempts at personal intimidation,” said Newzbin2′s Mr White in an email to TorrentFreak.

“The MPA were happy to line up their own lackey Copyright Dinosaurs organizations to support their the claim: the BPI, IFPI, Publishers Association and the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment lined up sycophantically and obediently behind the MPA. The MPA hypocrites didn’t feel that it was appropriate for anyone opposing their wishes to be heard.”

Nevertheless, the judge felt that DM’s submission should be aired and he allowed that to go ahead. Whether it has made any difference is yet to be seen.

“The court case concluded but the judge has ‘reserved judgment’ which I’m told means he will deliver his blocking order in an unknown form in a few weeks or so,” says Mr White. “Obviously we are nervous on behalf of our UK users and hope for the best.”

But for ‘DM’ the news on his predicted bankruptcy appears to be good. Because he won his submission he won’t have to pay the costs of the MPA opposing him.

“Of course, £7,500 wouldn’t be enough to buy the MPA any politicians so they probably aren’t that upset. Shame,” Mr White concludes.

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

The case was brought against BT by Twentieth Century Fox and five other major Hollywood film studios who had demanded that Newzbin2 should be stopped from providing links to unauthorized content.

Justice Arnold stated that BT had “actual knowledge” that people using its service were infringing copyright, and that users and operators of Newzbin2 infringe the copyrights of the studios.

Today, BT and the MPA are back in court to work out the final stage of this precedent-setting web-blocking case, but there will be a surprise last-minute addition to the proceedings. Following an earlier appeal from Newzbin2, a BT user has stepped forward and is bravely preparing to take on the MPA.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Mr White of TeamRDogs, the team behind Newzbin2, has confirmed that the individual has intervened in the case with an aim to prevent the site being blocked. His application will be heard today along with the blocking order.

“Already the MPA are trying to intimidate him by sending him a bill for $10,000 in costs,” Mr White told us. “They are trying to intimidate him by telling him he will be bankrupted if he loses!”

“We think that it’s typical of the MPA to say ‘noone from the site objected’ and then try to bury them in huge legal bills when they do,” he added. “We are providing him with moral support and we will be trying to encourage people to chip in for his legal costs if he loses, and we will help him out too.”

TorrentFreak has learned that the individual, who is both a user of Newzbin2 and BT, is attempting to intervene to prevent a full block of the site and make the MPA specifically identify which URLs should be blacklisted instead.

It is felt that both BT and the MPA have failed to correctly inform the court of the legal content to be found on Usenet and as such is under the impression none exists. Selective URL blacklisting will allow the legal content to continue as usual.

The ruling against Newzbin2 marks the first time that a site in the UK has been ordered to be blocked on copyright infringement grounds. More on this today when news from the hearing breaks.

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

Under the banner of the MPA, the leading Hollywood studios successfully argued that by letting the site continue uncensored their business in the UK would be severely damaged.

As previously noted, Newzbin2 weren’t party to the hearings but now they want to try and influence the outcome through BT’s customers.

“We’d be interested to hear if any of our UK British Telecom users would be interested in challenging the imminent web blocking to be imposed by the court at the behest of the MPA,” says Newzbin2′s Mr White in an announcement.

“We’ve have had interesting discussions with our lawyers who have advised us not to intervene in this action but they also say that there is nothing to stop our UK BT users from doing so on their own behalf (however you’ll need to be a BT user or use an ISP affected by the Cleanfeed censorship system).”

Although the court order is more than a month old, no blocking of Newzbin2 has yet been carried out.

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

The Motion Picture Association wanted an injunction ordering BT to block its subscribers from accessing Newzbin2, a site it claims causes the industry significant losses due to unlawful movie downloading.

Today a High Court judge ruled in the MPA’s favor and ordered BT to block Newzbin2.

“In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the Studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes,” said Justice Arnold in his ruling.

“It knows that the users of Newzbin2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin2.”

Despite earlier an statement which indicated that Newzbin2′s owners would hire lawyers to fight attempts to have them blocked in the UK, the site has not been represented during the hearings.

BT described the judgment as “helpful” since it provides clarity on a “complex issue”.

“It clearly shows that rights holders need to prove their claims and convince a judge to make a court order. BT has consistently said that rights holders need to take this route. We will return to court after the summer to explain what kind of order we believe is appropriate,” the ISP said in a statement.

Newzbin2 carries no illicit content of its own, but provides so-called “structural access” to content uploaded by others to the worldwide newsgroup (Usenet) system. Features offered by the members-only subscription site include a raw search, which is very similar to any other Internet search engine and is entirely legal.

The thorn in the MPA’s side, however, is the site’s supply of NZBs. These are torrent-like files which often link to named illicit content. These NZBs, which make otherwise complicated Usenet downloading a breeze, are organized by Newzbin2′s editors into categories such as CAM, Screener, Telesync, R5 and Workprint, titles which leave little to the imagination when it comes to considering the legitimacy of their sources.

Both MPA and BT will be back in court during October to decide on the practicalities of carrying out the injunction.

Now that the MPA has been successful in this website-blocking bid, there are concerns that this phenomenon will spread to other targets. Initially other ISPs in the UK will be expected to follow suit and block Newzbin2 too, a development confirmed by the MPA this morning.

Update: The admins of Newzbin2 have published their official response to the news – read here.

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

The celebrations following the site’s demise were to be short-lived. Newzbin was quickly resurrected under new management as Newzbin2, and the MPA faced the prospect of taking on new legal action against the site’s new owners. Rather than tackle Newzbin2 head on, Hollywood tried a different approach.

During September 2010, TorrentFreak learned that the MPA were developing plans to take leading UK ISP BT to court and by December we had solid proof that was indeed the case. The MPA went to court seeking an injunction against BT in order to force them to block Newzbin2.

“In launching this case, the MPA is aiming to secure an order that will enable BT to block Internet access to the site, thus preventing the site from using the Internet to make money through infringement,” the MPA informed us in a statement.

This week the MPA are back at the High Court again, hoping it can get an injunction to force BT to block the site for its 5.6 million subscribers. According to an MPA spokesperson, BT was selected for two reasons.

“BT was chosen because it’s the largest [ISP] and already has the technology in place, through its Cleanfeed system, to block the site,” she said.

Developed by BT at an estimated cost of £500,000, Cleanfeed is a content blocking system that has been operational since 2004. In conjunction with information supplied by the Internet Watch Foundation, it is used by BT to block child pornography sites.

Traffic destined for a blacklisted URL or IP address is intercepted by Cleanfeed. At this point BT impersonates the destination web server and returns an HTTP 404 status code, causing a subscriber’s web browser to show a site “not found” message.

It is unclear how much development work has been done on the system since its inception, but early versions of Cleanfeed had a number of limitations. The product only worked on the standard port for regular browsing, port 80. It was also unable to block encrypted or proxied web traffic, unless the proxy itself was on the blacklist.

Interestingly, according to comments made in 2004 by Mike Galvin, then Director of Internet Services for BT Retail, the company already had concerns that outsiders would attempt to widen the purpose of Cleanfeed. Another ISP, Wanadoo, was apparently approached by the BPI to use a system similar to Cleanfeed to block music piracy.

In response, Galvin said that if the pressure to “extend the scope” of Cleanfeed became too great, BT would cancel the project. BT has made no recent public comment to that effect in connection with this current action by the MPA.

“The MPA application to engage in censorship of the Internet for their own petty interests would, if granted, set a dangerous precedent in a Western democracy,” Newzbin told TorrentFreak in an earlier statement.

“‘Drive-by’ litigation such as this will cut off access to substantial legitimate content and is entirely unwarranted & disproportionate.”

Newzbin have already taken steps to mitigate any site blocking measures by using the TOR anonymity system.

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

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

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.