MPAA tackles usenet search engines

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The MPAA announced yesterday that it has filed lawsuits against a number of websites “associated with movie piracy.” Among the sites affected are the usenet search engines Binnews, DVDRs.net and NZB-Zone, with which the film industry is targeting the use of newsgroups for the first time. Well-known torrent sites such as TorrentSpy, TorrentBox and IsoHunt and the eDonkey sleuth Ed2k-it have also received notice from the MPAA lawyers; NiteShadow’s search engine has even been taken offline. “This is an important step in shutting down the powerful illegal file-sharing networks,” MPAA anti-piracy specialist John Malcom said.

Global search engines such as Google and Yahoo are closely following the developments, because copyrighted material can also be found on their websites. Google lost a lawsuit this week from a porn producer, who complained that the search engine was using its footage incorrectly. However, the now indicted sites do not distribute protected material themselves under any circumstances. In addition, under controversial DMCA law, search engines are exempt from copyright infringement as long as website operators are not aware of infringements and provided they comply with requests to remove specific protected material from the index. Moreover, according to Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it is still not an established fact that the legislation will stand in court. Most cases about this are settled out of court, so that there is no case law.

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