I’ve been reading and trying to wrap my head around usenets and while I’m making some progress, some things still don’t make sense. In particular copyright enforcement and why it is not easier than torrents to enforce copyrights.
With torrents, all a copyright lawyer has to go by is the IP address of a seed, but if they use a no logging VPN, it’s a dead end. In Canada there’s been some new legal precedent where courts have allowed copyright holders to sue unnamed people at IP addresses, and also a real time takedown system to remove pirated live sports. Still looks like a dead end with a good no logs VPN (good luck getting them to log without a court order).
With usenets, it’s a bit more centralized, so can’t copyright holders just sign up for all the providers and indexers and when they find their copyrighted content, ask the providers to take down all the files associated with the .nzb across all servers they are in control of? As well, can’t they get a court order to require the usenet providers to handover logs and personally identifying information for everyone that downloaded any portion of those files?
Second question, despite all these copyright cat and mouse games, why does there not appear to be a market for a usenet or streaming service, say in Russia, that gives you any material you could want thats protected by copyrights in western countries? ISPs in the west would just see regular HTTPS traffic, albeit from Russia, and I’m sure the Russian govt wouldn’t care if it’s a curated library of only western copyright protected stuff?