Fall of Dutch Usenet Community's

[ZieDee]

Let me start of by saying i live in the Netherlands. We have several laws here that may not apply in your country. Im writting this, i have a brother who is complete dependant in all his needs, physicly and verbally.

One of his big pleassures is music, and he has over thousand's of CD's and some CD's he has like 5 or 6 exact the same (all legaly bought). At times there isn't money to buy the same CD again. So i download them and burn it for him. I strongly believe in if you bought it once you are entitled to make a backup or even download a backup if you don't have the know how to make a backup yourself or either the disc is so heavily scratched it cant be backup.
That being said let me continue:

One of the Dutch law's is the right to obtain a copy of something you own Music and Video (not Software or games those are illegal) for backup purposes. Even obtaining them from illegal source (read p2p/torrent/Usenet/ftp) is considered legal. Sharing them (uploading) or displaying them in public places however is illegal. This law made it safe for people to start building community's. Over the years the Usenet community has grown very large over here. Main reason for this could possibly be that you only download and not upload. Most ISP's here include binaries support as a free service.

In these community's people share and point out to each other where to find a certain backup, what name it has, if it includes par2 files and if its real/fake or contains a virus. However on February 9th the largest Usenet community FTD (with over 440k members) lost it's lawsuit and the judge sentenced FTD to close its platform. The main reason was the kudos system, and FTD was titled upload encouraging. Kudos is a way to reward someone with virtual points for spotting something intresting. FTD existed 9 years but will now be forced to stop all activity's starting on 1 march 2011.

If you have read this and still find it so easily to talk about pirated things think again, that kind of behaviour can be the downfall of any platform. Be kind to psx-scene as they bring you knowledge and news and think twice before talking about pirated things.

Edit: 44k members should have been 440k members.