French users who use Internet Service Provider “Free” recently found out that their ISP was ordered by the court to suspend access to 39 newsgroups. The order came after a complaint by the major record label organization operating in France known as the SCPP.
Usenet may be the oldest and most widely popular traditional ways of getting movies and music. While it has, for the longest time, been one of the more secured ways of getting content online, it is also one of the more complicated and less user friendly ways of getting that content – outside of using NZB files that is. While BitTorrent and many other file-sharing networks have been touched by so-called “anti-piracy” organizations, Usenet has remained, for the most part relatively unscathed – unscathed until recently that is.
The SCPP recently announced (Translated by Google – original version) that they, along with SACEM and SDRM, successfully got a court to order French ISP “Free” to suspend 39 newsgroups for six months. SCPP operates in France and represents major record labels.
According to Wikipedia, Free, “Free claims to be the first profitable ISP in France” and is one of three major ISPs operating in France.
01net reports (Google translated – original version) that other French ISPs were pressured into discontinuing binary newsgroup access altogether in order to avoid liability. Free refused to do so because of their philosophy on the internet.
The site also reports that this isn’t the first time Free was forced to suspend newsgroups. Last year, Free was ordered byt the courts to suspend access to 14 other newsgroups.
Wikipedia describes the hierarchy of newsgroups as:
These were all created in the Great Renaming of 1986–1987, prior to which all of these newsgroups were in the net.* hierarchy. At that time there was a great controversy over what newsgroups should be allowed. Among those that the usenet cabal (who effectively ran the Big 7 at the time) did not allow were those concerning recipes, drugs, and sex.
This resulted in the creation of an alt.* (short for “alternative”) usenet hierarchy where these groups would be allowed. Over time the laxness of rules on newsgroup creation in alt.* compared to the Big 7 meant that many new topics could, given time, gain enough popularity to get a Big 7 newsgroup. This resulted in a rapid growth of alt.* which continues to this day.
So while this is a unique blow to newsgroups, at least in France, little will change since there will likely be other newsgroups popping up to circumvent this suspension of the groups. Though since newsgroups primary focus is on discussions, one might argue that this is also an attack on free speech.
The other thing to consider is the fact that France is part of the European Union. As we here at ZeroPaid already reported today which was followed up by our initial report three days ago, blocking access to the internet hit a roadblock by European parliamentarians. It is currently unclear how this legislation will affect the court decision to force the French ISP to suspend newsgroups.
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/French_ISP_Ordered_to_Suspend_39_Newsgroups’;
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