Court Ruled Usenet Provider Is Not Responsible for Piracy

The now defunct News-Service.com, which used to be one of the leading Usenet providers, is celebrating a court victory against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. Recently the appeals court overturned a previous ruling and decided that the News-Service.com is not responsible for monitoring and filtering of the pirated content.

5 years ago, BREIN, which represented the content industries, launched a lawsuit against Europe’s largest Usenet provider News-Service Europe. The anti-piracy group demanded that the Usenet provider delete all pirated material from its servers, and three years ago the Court of Amsterdam sided with the plaintiffs.

At the time, the Court of Amsterdam argued that News-Service willingly facilitated copyright violation via its services. In its decision the Court ruled that the Usenet provider had to remove all copyrighted material from its servers and filter future content for piracy. In response, News-Service Europe said that it was economically unfeasible to filter all posts, and due to this the company had no other option than to shut down its operations while the appeal was pending.

Finally, the Appeals Court ruled on the case and overturned the previous decision. This set a more positive precedent for such services as Usenet providers and others. According to the court, News-Service Europe doesn’t facilitate copyright violation as long as it maintains a procedure allowing the rights owners to submit takedown notices without restrictions. Moreover, the Appeals Court decided that proactive filtering of copyrighted material is unnecessary, because it conflicts with existing jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice.

Of course, News-Service Europe was very pleased with this ruling, saying that the Court correctly pointed out that a Usenet provider like them can’t be expected to proactively monitor the posts published by the others.

However, it should be noted that the recent ruling is an interlocutory verdict, because the Court still has to decide on how the company’s notice and takedown procedure should operate. In addition, both sides of the suit can escalate the matter to the Supreme Court.