Newzbin vs MPAA: An interview with the Usenet indexing site's legal team, weeks away from court.

Many of you would have heard about the recent not guilty verdict handed out to Alan Ellis, owner of OiNk - the ex Bit-Torrent site. However, his case revolved around the criminal allegations of fraud due to donations to the site and not the civil matters surrounding file-sharing and indexing of copyrighted content. In the coming months, a massive legal precedent will be set for NZB and torrent sites alike due the upcoming court case between Newzbin.com, the Usenet indexer and the MPAA, a group of Hollywood's largest studios. The main question the court will be answering once and for all is whether sites like Newzbin can continue operating within the confines of English law.

For those not in the know, Newzbin does not hold any copyrighted content and merely indexes the content of Usenet much like Google does when it indexes the contents of the web to make it searchable. The site also created the NZB file format and provides these files with its post; these also contain no copyrighted content and merely contain the locations to the header files on Usenet itself: a pointer if you will.

Back in December of 2008, the news initially broke that the MPAA were suing Newzbin with the release of the following statement from Newzbin Admin Caesium:

You may have noticed that recently we suspended a number of existing reports. This was done after receiving notification from the MPA that those reports were potentially of their copyrighted works. This suspension will remain until the reports are verified not to be infringing.

Despite this, in the last week, we received notice that the MPA have filed for an injunction against us. We are thus now going through the motions of filling out paperwork etc and will see what happens next. There's not much else to tell you at this stage; we'll keep you posted.

A year later, after a lot of administrative work from the Newzbin admin and legal teams, we're very close to the case actually being heard in the High Courts of the UK and so we took it upon ourselves to ask a few questions. While reading, please bare in mind that a lot of the more interesting questions we asked couldn't be answered due to the fact the trial hasn't started yet, we will of course be coming back to those at a later date.

The Interview

Our interview with a member of the Newzbin.com legal team.

Has a date been set for the trial, what level of court will it be taking place in, and how long is the case expected to take?

The case is to take place in the Chancery division of the High Court - a senior court. No firm date has been fixed for the hearing but it will be within the next couple of months. The length is hard to guess it but will probably take around a week give or take a couple of days.

What exactly are they suing you for?

"Stimulating granting of access to copyright infringing material. promoting and inducing infringement so as to authorise copying; procuring & encouraging; participating in a common design to infringe; communicating works without consent." That's not the wording but the gist of it.

What happens if you win? Does it grant you immunity from being sued for the same thing again? Will the site return to open membership and be non-private?

We can't speculate as to how we'll respond either to a win or a defeat. We are looking at a variety of options we can't discuss. If we win it would be very difficult, but not impossible, for the MPAA to launch a fresh action: at least not without significantly new facts, any such action would be tantamount, in effect, to an attempt to retry the first case and the court may well dismiss it. Of course with substantially new facts they possibly could, but we imagine/hope they'd have no appetite for it. That said they have a bottomless pit of money.

If you lose, what will remain of the site? What data will the MPAA/courts get access to given a win - user profiles and history etc? Is there a possibility of a large fine at the end which would see the end of Newzbin Ltd as a trading company?

We haven't given away an editor or subscriber data not available already on the site nor would we do so without a court order. No request has been made by the MPAA and no order given; no subscriber or editor data has been given to any third party. A win would not entitle the MPAA to this data - that's not the point of their action. The matter is a civil one so there is no 'fine' involved just damages but if the MPAA win big then the damages might be huge albeit not on an American scale.

Are you going to be using OiNK's win in any defence? We understand the charges there were for fraud and that this is only a civil matter. How about other past cases?

There are no UK precedents relevant to this case so far as we are aware. There is obviously US caselaw but that is of no real use to us.

How does the Usenet.com ruling affect the case? We realise Newzbin has never actively encouraged piracy.

Usenet.com was a completely different matter they stored material and we merely index it. They were, it seems, focussed on infringement but we have a different business model and goals.

The MPAA was one complainant, who was the other one? Is this case just for the one company, or both?

Strictly although we talk of the MPAA as an abbreviation it is actually all the large Hollywood studios who are the claimants.

Do you expect as much media attention as Oink and Alan Ellis received?

As a civil matter our guess is that it will receive very much less press.

Newzbin.com Statement

Newzbin also released this statement in addition to our set of questions.

We value our users and regret any uncertainty that the legal situation causes them. Our users have been marvellously supportive and we value them all very highly.

We can say that NO users or editors have been targeted by the MPAA in this case and that we have handed over no personal details or activity of any user or editor at all. We will do whatever is necessary, and within the law, to protect our users. We know that the vast majority of our users behave morally and lawfully and we are confident that the court will take our view of this.

Newzbin is sufficiently well funded that the extremely high legal costs of mounting a comprehensive and aggressive defence can be met; we accept this cost willingly as a commitment to our loyal and highly valued users.

We welcome the acquittal of Oink and, although the legal issues are very different, we aim to deliver a second knock-out blow to the US content industry in the UK in the coming months. Like Oink we are a legitimate search engine and what we do is lawful and honest.

As always we will be keeping in touch and covering the case in full; here's hoping for a good outcome. If you have any question you'd like to pose to the legal team, please leave a comment and we'll do our best to get a response (however, due to legal issues and the fact the case hasn't started yet, not everything can be answered).

We'd like to thank Newzbin for taking the time to answer our questions and all here at UsenetShack (and I'm sure the rest of the industry) wish Newzbin and it's legal team the best of luck in the upcoming trial. Here's hoping they won't need it.

Update

1st February 2010

The trial has started at the High Court in Temple, read our coverage of Day One.