Newzbin2 was a website that offered up aggregated newsgroup links to pirated content. It was opened after the demise of the original Newzbin service, which closed with huge debts after being sued by the Motion Picture Association. The new Newzbin2 service opened, with a completely new “management” who said that any take down requests due to infringement would be heeded and aimed to be 100 per cent DCMA compliant.
Major ISP blocks
In July 2011 the movie industry won a court case which meant that Newzbin2 would be blocked by major UK ISPs. Newzbin2 said that the block was ineffective because its users were issued a workaround in September pre-empting the blocking implementation in November. Newzbin2 representatives told the BBC at that time 93.5 per cent of its users had downloaded the software to bypass the ISP blocks.
Editors left, payment providers withdrew services
If the ISP block was its only problem Newzbin2 might have still soldiered on, but another couple of problems have hit it hard. The site has had a staffing problem “caused by the majority of our editors dropping out & no-one replacing them.” Also possibly more serious is that it became more and more difficult for the site to get payments from its customers and would-be customers. “To make things worse all our payment providers dropped out or started running scared. The MPA sued Paypal and are going at our innocent payment provider Kthxbai Ltd in the UK. Our other payment provider has understandably lost their nerve. Result? We have no more payment providers to offer & no realistic means of taking money,” a statement on what is left of the Newzbin2 website says.
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Newzbin2 never managed to regain the popularity of its predecessor. In part that is because some users thought that “Newzbin2 is an MPA trap”. The original Newzbin was said to have 700,000 registered users of whom “only a few 10's of thousands paid premium topups”. The Newzbin2 service never had more than about 40,000 registered users with paying customers in the “small thousands”. Any business needs to make profit to survive and the statement on the Newzbin2 website announcing the closure said “It costs much more to run than we bring in, it just doesn't stack up.” The statement ended by saying that the site will not be back as a search service but may be replaced by a blog some day. I can get to the www.newzbin2.es site via my ISP, PlusNet, but if it is blocked by most major ISPs then it’s probably better to start a blog on a completely new site...
