Following The Newzbin Whac-A-Mole Game

I hadn’t been following the story of Newzbin very closely. It was yet another Usenet indexer harassed and shut down by lawsuits from the entertainment industry. At some point, it begins to get tedious to try to follow all of the different sites that Hollywood gives free advertising to by suing, so we just skip over a bunch. However, it is amusing to find out that after Newzbin shut down (due to money issues from fighting the lawsuit), the site reappeared through a convoluted set of circumstances, involving some hackers getting into the old Newzbin system a while back and regularly copying the whole thing, a rent-back leasing arrangement with the domain (which allowed for it to be sold off), and some other random (but shadowy) parties. My guess is that the Hollywood folks aren’t going to believe any of this, and will insist that Newzbin is still being operated by the same folks, but it does seem like yet another example of what a useless game of whac-a-mole the industry keeps playing. It used to be whenever they shut down one such site, another similar one would pop up. These days, it might even be the same exact site. At some point, isn’t it time to realize that going after these sites isn’t stopping anything?

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