Little-used corner of Net becomes piracy battlefield
Movie industry sues companies that aid downloads on Usenet
An obscure data network technology called the Usenet has become the newest battleground between the entertainment industry and digital music and movie pirates.
Late last month, the Motion Picture Association of America filed its first-ever lawsuits against Internet companies that help people download illegally copied films over the Usenet. The association says that the companies, NZB-Zone, BinNews, and DVDRS, provide a Google-like search service for Usenet, one that lets its users find thousands of pirated films, including recent hits such as ''King Kong," ''The Chronicles of Narnia," and ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin."
The three companies did not respond to e-mail messages requesting comment. Their websites do not list physical addresses or phone numbers, and one of them, DVDRS, has apparently been shut down. Even the lawsuits filed against the companies identify them as John Does, and do not include contact information.
A successful action against the three firms could lead to more lawsuits against other Usenet index sites, such as Newzbin.com and Nfonews.com. ''A common misconception among people who use networks like these is that they're in a group that is above the law," said movie industry association spokeswoman Kori Bernards. Indeed, she said the popularity of the Usenet as a place to swap illegal files has grown recently, perhaps because the music and movie industries have successfully shut down several distributors of peer-to-peer software, the most popular means of file swapping.
In a peer-to-peer system, users run software that links their computers to thousands of others on the Internet. The users can then search each other's computers for desirable files, and download the ones they want. But it's relatively easy to identify people using such software, because each computer must reveal its unique Internet address. Entertainment industry investigators can simply join the file-sharing network, then record the addresses of all the other machines. Armed with this information, investigators have sued thousands of people for downloading files illegally.
In addition, the entertainment industry last year won a major victory at the US Supreme Court, which held that companies that distribute file-swapping software can be held liable for encouraging people to break copyright law. Since then, several major peer-to-peer software distributors have shut down, including Grokster, WinMX, and i2hub.
Meanwhile, huge numbers of illegal video and music files are traded every day on the Usenet. Invented in 1980 at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, Usenet is like a giant bulletin board, featuring tens of thousands of ''newsgroups," each devoted to a particular subject, such as baseball, computer gaming, or anthropology.
Originally separate from the Internet, the Usenet is still not as fully integrated into the network as e-mail or the World Wide Web. Many Usenet bulletin boards can be accessed through the Google search service, which maintains an index of Usenet messages. Internet companies like
The Usenet also has long been a center for illegal file swapping. The Usenet accepts only files of a limited size, written in plain text. But programmers wrote software that would take any kind of file, translate it into strings of text, and chop the strings into thousands of separate files. A downloader collects these files, and uses another program to turn them back into music, movies, or pirated software. Usenet also offers the downloader an extra measure of privacy, because the Internet address of his machine is known only to the Usenet server and can't be intercepted by investigators.
The Usenet has long been one of the primary sources for the illegal files found through peer-to-peer services, according to Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne Media Measurement, a Los Angeles company that tracks illegal file downloads.
Garland compared Hollywood's attack on the Usenet companies to ''a strategic strike to cut off the supply, like a drug cartel. This is top of the food chain stuff."
Until now, it's been relatively difficult for ordinary Internet users to get at illegal Usenet files. They aren't indexed by Google, and downloading them is often a slow, painstaking process.
The three companies being sued by the movie industry use a technology that goes a long way toward solving this problem. The sites don't actually store illegal files. Instead, they offer indexes of the files based on NZB, a new search technology. NZB identifies and indexes millions of individual Usenet postings, sorting them into thousands of music and movie files. A visitor to one of the sites can type in the name of a movie and quickly get a list of the Usenet postings he must download. With software available at low cost over the Internet, a user can then connect to his Usenet account and easily download and reassemble the messages into a viewable movie.
The rise of NZB has attracted file downloaders like ''Frew," the Internet chatroom nickname of a 21-year-old network administrator in Tampa Bay, Fla. ''I have used newsgroups for a long while, but just started using NZBs to make things much easier about three months ago," wrote Frew, who didn't want to be identified for fear of prosecution. So far, Frew has downloaded ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," ''Jarhead," ''Flightplan," ''Full Metal Jacket," and ''Top Gun," among others. Frew said that he felt safe doing his downloads on Usenet, because unlike peer-to-peer systems, it's hard for investigators to identify the individual downloaders. ''The servers I use do not monitor what files you download," Frew wrote.
James Toledano, director of digital music at
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. ARE YOU STILL FILE SHARING?
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