Two weeks ago, Newzbin.com suddenly closed down completely, after having lost in court against MPAA. Today, Newzbin.com is back online and on servers in Sweden – but as “Newzbin 2” and with new owners. Owners, who “hacked” Newzbin some time ago to get the source code.
Behind Newzbin 2 is “Team R Dogs” and their front guy seems to be “Mr. White”. An interview with Mr. White was conducted by Revoltingfilesharers Blog, it can be read in full here.
To the question why Mr. White stole the Newzbin source code, he says:
I nicked it initially just because I could, that was a while back. There was no real ‘plan’, I just kinda did it, but I didn’t want to copy the site and didn’t even really plan to use it. […]
Of course Mr. White is aware that MPAA is eventually going to come after them, like they did with “Newzbin 1”. Mr. White says that Newzbin 2 will simply “do a piratebay on them” and that they can run faster than MPAA and shapeshift too – whatever that means.
If you’re into Usenet downloading (legal stuff only, of course…), you need a usenet account which you can get at Newshosting or Usenetserver for as little as $10 a month with free SSL encryption. They have a 2 week free trial available too.
It is going to be interesting to see how all of this stuff eventually plays out. Not meaning specifically with MPAA and Mr. White’s shape shifting ability, but simply the whole legal/illegal sharing issue.
People have become very used to things being free on the net. The Music industry is a classic example. The net is simply turning business models on their head and the old establishment is just simply trying to hold on and fight the good fight, but in the end they can’t stop it, so they better adapt and change their model.