In the ongoing battle between the cartels and infringers of copyrights sits the aptly named middlemen in most cases that's either an application or a service provided by a vendor (commonly an ISP company or others) and those are often the target of malicious lawsuits designed to tie up the cartels enemies finances, its a dirty legal trick but it does often seem to work.
Recently as part of such an ongoing effort selected providers of a Newsgroup indexing service have been targetted, in this case part of a concerted campaign to hit such providers and this hit seem to be something that could upset the fragile balance of liabilities and thus threaten all newsgroup indexers and the newsgroup arena itself.http://www.slyck.com/story2219_Dutch_Court_Forces_NewsService_Europe_to_Remove_Binary_Content
There's a big ruling coming out of the Netherlands against one of the biggest newsgroup providers. A dutch court ruled against the Dutch based provider News-Service to remove all binary content, sans the regular non-binary content. If they fail to do so, News-Service may face a 50.000 Euro per day fine. This is by far one of the striking decisions against a Usenet provider since the community site FTD was forced to remove its indexing links.
For those of you who may not be aware of what the newsgroups are let me add a small explanation here:
Back in the early days of the internet ( before the WWW existed) folks wanted to have globally supported chat/bulletin boards that they could leave messages on of simple text and across wide ranging topics and this system is still alive today, however some bright spark thought why limit the files to simply text and with that extension a whole raft of new services sprung up to support such activity, folks can download the latest in content there albeit the files do come in a strange format and its not uncommon to have hundreds of small files that will create a movie, this then is the basis of the method and as its a downloading only method theres little in the way of legal liability for anyone using it, the files are broadcast and stored at hundreds of locations as part of the newsgroup distribution mechanism so once the contest is broadcast its pretty hard to destroy all copies, no one has thus far worked out a method that will work successfully. The cartels have struck at the weak point in all this, the "finding the content" stage, its not as easy to find the content as it is with a traditional p2p method and thus importantly "indexers" sprung up to aid folks to find all these new "binary" ( as opposed to plain text) groups, the cartels strategy is to make the illicit content harder to find and by hitting at the indexers this strategy is likely to succeed.