Is the MPAA turning a blind eye to rampant movie piracy on Usenet? at FreshDV

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Is the MPAA turning a blind eye to rampant movie piracy on Usenet?

Published by admin October 18th, 2006 in News

In The MPAA Surrenders in War Against Piracy, PCMag commentator Mark Hachman takes the Motion Picture Association of America to task for the blind eye they have seemingly turned towards Usenet giant GUBA. If you aren’t familiar with GUBA, they have recently partnered with major movie studios to sell downloadable films, and offer some free user-submitted content, ala YouTube. They have a program for smaller content distributors as well, with an ad-sharing model. But here is the kicker…they are also a company that stores and sells access to Usenet archives, in fact that is how they got started. Interestingly, nearly two terabytes of binary data is added everyday to Usenet, according to a recent report:

Here is what Guba does with that material:
* Crawls Usenet for multimedia content, indexing over 300,000 files a day (currently only videos and images).
* Automatically indexes the content via metadata tags, so it can be easily viewed, sorted, filtered and searched.
* Universal playback - converts video content from any format so that users can immediately play the video, eliminating the need for different players/Codecs.

Access to the archives is subscription based, with “tens of thousands of customers” each paying $15 a month. It is widely known that Usenet “content” is larely comprised of copyrighted and pirated material, but GUBA claims they are just a search engine and are not responsible for what is actually archived.

From GUBA’s About page:

“In compliance with the DMCA, GUBA accepts user-generated video in all common formats and indexes content from areas of the Internet that major search engines do not search.

Major Hollywood studios, distributors and independent film makers alike use GUBA to seamlessly reach one of the fastest growing audiences on the Internet. GUBA protects content owners using the latest DRM solutions and a proprietary, MPAA-approved filtering technology named ‘Johnny.’”

And according to PCMag’s Mark Hachman, “Johnny” doesn’t seem to be doing his job. So Mark made some calls to MPAA representatives, the response was suprisingly nonchalant from an agency with a reputation for ruthlessness:

“It’s our understanding that Guba.com is committed to using ‘Johnny’ to filter MPAA movies on their network,” the spokeswoman said. “They’ve been working with us in good faith, and they’ll continue to do so. We have a relationship with Guba, and they have a commitment into making sure that they don’t offer copyrighted content. We’ll continue to monitor the situation, and if for some reason it doesn’t happen we will talk to them.”

Hachman’s point is that the by ignoring the fact that GUBA provides access to these pirated and illegal files, they are undermining the very position they have taken in suits and actions agains P2P and Torrent-indexing sites.

“…here’s the rub: in February, the MPAA filed suit against sites including TorrentSpy and BTHub, arguing that even links to copyrighted content encourage people to download illegally. Meanwhile, Guba happily provides copyrighted content to the public. And the MPAA has utterly lost the moral high ground, if it hadn’t already.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the Guba archive is an MPAA-sanctioned supply of copyrighted content…Seriously, if a site provides downloadable content using an MPAA-approved filtering algorithm to weed out copyrighted content, isn’t that a safe argument that downloaders should be free from liability?”

These sound like reasoned arguments to me. How can the MPAA ignore the very arguments it used against the plethora of sites it has already shut down, sites that were only providing links to content? Does this hypocrisy extend only to those that also shill for the studios? What do you think?

17 Responses to “Is the MPAA turning a blind eye to rampant movie piracy on Usenet?”

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1 Vic Oct 18th, 2006 at 4:42 pm

Ive always wondered why they dont ever mention Usenet and always bash bittorent.
2 goodcow Oct 19th, 2006 at 8:55 am

Shh. The first rule of Usenet is that we don’t talk about Usenet.
3 aaron Oct 19th, 2006 at 9:08 am

usenet is the last bastion of internet’s wild west.. go guba!
4 Buss Oct 19th, 2006 at 9:22 am

R0CK on USENET, keep that MPAA in ur back pocket! we’ll pwn them…but yah, goodcow is rih…we dont talk about usenet…ever!
5 Anonymous Oct 19th, 2006 at 9:50 am

The reason the MPAA can ignore the same thing they say when it works against them is this isnt about justice or fair use. It’s about a monopoly maintaining its grip on the distro chain. Nothing more.. Uncommon greed on par with Microsoft is the reason…
6 Anonymous Oct 19th, 2006 at 10:03 am

lol, I think it’s just funny that people are finally figuring out that most of the “illegal content” on the net is easiest (and in all honesty safest) to obtain via usenet or irc. It’s been this way since the early 90s folks.
7 Anonymous Oct 19th, 2006 at 11:57 am

Does anyone remember way back when. There was a time when the MPAA actually gave USENET hell. A whole bunce of .binaries.movies groups were pulled. NOW, Bittorrent runs interference while USENET regains a lot of it’s former glory.

I love bittorrent, mainly for taking heat off usenet.
8 Bruce Anderson Oct 19th, 2006 at 3:08 pm

I’ve been “aware” of Usenet for something like fourteen years now. Never once have I heard in all that time of an MPAA crackdown. Who, exactly, would they have cracked down on? It’s up to the individual provider (Giganews, EasyNews, etc) which groups they’ll carry. There’s no central server somewhere. When did this happen? You say, “back in the day” but digital media trading has really only been possible for the last ten years or so. A crackdown on Usenet would have been pretty big news, very hard to ignore. It NEVER HAPPENED!

But let’s say the MPAA did go after all the big names, and managed to get a court order demanding they delete the infringing binaries groups. Big deal! Soon enough other groups would propagate through the system replacing the lost groups, or else someone would just remake the groups.

Short of an all-out ban on NNTP (which would be completely unenforcable) it’s simply impossible to kill file trading via Usenet. It’s like the hydra: cut off one head, and ten more grow up to take its place.
9 freshdv Oct 19th, 2006 at 3:25 pm

Short of an all-out ban on NNTP (which would be completely unenforcable) it’s simply impossible to kill file trading via Usenet. It’s like the hydra: cut off one head, and ten more grow up to take its place.

I think that’s precisely the point made here, Bruce. The disparity is that the MPAA has chosen to chase bittorrent instead, even when services like GUBA offer extremely convenient access to the copyrighted content, and even the ability to transcode it to different formats. The MPAA is certainly aware of GUBA, as they are in bed selling content together. And they look the other way, even though Usenet and GUBA in particular potentially pose as big a threat as bittorrent.

I’ll end with a quote I read in a comment recently, with slight alterations: “Short of an all-out ban on Bittorrent (which would be completely unenforcable) it’s simply impossible to kill file trading via torrents. It’s like the hydra: cut off one head, and ten more grow up to take its place.”

You would think that it would be easier to shut down actual businesses like GUBA, Easynews, etc vs a torrent site that is hosted off the coast of albania. But what do I know.
10 Anonymous Oct 19th, 2006 at 5:48 pm

They have been going after the usenet, classic example is the limited amount of dvd screeners for major motion films since the crackdown of the people supplying them earlier in the year. This article is not entirely accurate.

Dean
JJJ
11 Anonymous Oct 19th, 2006 at 5:51 pm

“Shh. The first rule of Usenet is that we don’t talk about Usenet. ” - LOL :)

TripleJ
12 Anonymous Oct 21st, 2006 at 6:34 am

The best explanation is that GUBA has a financial deal with MPAA/Studios. BT does not.
Thus prodcing incomes from several revenue sources. Not just ticket and DVD sales but from the persecution of BT users. The question, that the interviewer should have asked was whether GUBA, or affililate, has any financial ties to the MPAA/Studios/Affililates.
13 lars Oct 23rd, 2006 at 10:38 am

I think the reason they haven’t gone after Usenet is that back before the Internet was big people did try to go after Usenet in the courts, and failed. This was mostly because of kiddy porn, not movies and music. This set legal precedent. Usenet providers are protected by this. Maybe a change in the law would change that, but the xxAA would rather spend their bribe money on getting other laws passed since not many people use Usenet.

If they made Usenet go offshore by closing down US/Canadian providers then it would cripple Usenet as bandwidth would be a lot more costly.

I did a paper that touched on this topic before. It was more about if file shareing was possible to stop.

As long as there are countries out there that will turn a blind eye to copyright things will stay basically the same. I’m not going to go into why countries like this will not get blocked off from the Internet, but there are solid reasons for that not to happen.

If all else fails then wireless mesh networks will pop-up, and those would take up too much resources to stop.
14 Anonymous Oct 23rd, 2006 at 2:38 pm

[quote]“Shh. The first rule of Usenet is that we don’t talk about Usenet. ” - LOL :)
[/quote]
This moron actually finds this funny.

I agree with 1st comment. The more Usenet is discussed the more it becomes idiot friendly then ultimately goes mainstream. Kindly, like BitTorrent is now. Remember the days of donkax? When bittorrent was pure underground.

The less the masses know how to dl via Usenet the safer we are.
15 Anonymous Nov 10th, 2006 at 10:58 pm

>[quote]“Shh. The first rule of >Usenet is that we don’t talk >about Usenet. ” - LOL :)
>[/quote]
>This moron actually finds this >funny.

Hey guy get a sense of humor
And it was funny
16 Anonymous Nov 11th, 2006 at 12:47 am

[quote]“Shh. The first rule of Usenet is that we don’t talk about Usenet. ” - LOL :)
[/quote]
This moron actually finds this funny.

———-

Wow are you an uptight prick. It was hysterical in fact.
17 Anonymous Nov 20th, 2006 at 7:09 pm

For the last time, there is no such thing as UseNet! It’s a hoax people!!!
UseNet=hoax UseNet=fake UseNet=Not.Real

For more information on this or many other popular internet myths,
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/usenet
If you can’t find it on hoaxbusters, it does not exist!