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. You can read the press release on this here.

According to BREIN, "The court considers that not much can be expected from a Notice & Take Down procedure because illegal content is shared with other USPs before right holders can be aware it has been made available on the servers of NSE. Also NSE's argument that it would not be able to filter all binaries on unauthorized content does not impede an injunction. The court rules: "The large scale infringement on copyright protected works makes an injunction necessary, while the limitation to binaries makes the measure proportional in relation to its objective of protection of the many rights holders."

Date: 2011-09-30 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=2219