NewzBin2 Ordered To Be Blocked By British Court

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There’s been a big loss for the file-sharing community. Yesterday, the UK High Court ordered BT (British Telecom), a major internet service provider in that country, to block customers’ access to NewzBin2, a Usenet index. This is the second time that the content providers (The MPA – Motion Picture Association) has succeeded in blocking the indexing site.

Although Usenet predates the world wide web – it’s commonly used for sharing copyrighted files. Last year, a UK judge found that NewzBin made no attempt to stop or block copyrighted material from being exchanged on their site, and ordered it to be shut down. A few months later, NewzBin2 emerged, with the servers being hosted in the African island nation of Seychelles.

But, now the MPA has struck a blow against NewsBin2. The MPA filed for an injunction against NewzBin2, and just yesterday the UK judge granted it. BT customers will now be blocked from accessing NewzBin2 by the Cleanfeed content blocking system.

No word on if the folks at NewzBin2 have any plans of getting around this or any legal retaliation planned. According to the Wall Street Journal, NewzBin2 is based in England (although, as mentioned, the servers are based in Seychelles) and they made over £1 million in revenue last year.

It’s also interesting to see the content providers go after the newsgroups. It seems that most of their attempts to crack down on the filesharing of copyrighted content was focused on the P2P networks like Kazaa or BitTorrent.

What do you think about this? Any BT customers out there mad they can’t access NewzBin2? Give us your take on this in the comments section.