approval from:
Ryan 
| reply to JohnQPublic
Re: [Newsgroups] 20th Century Fox & Others v Newzbin 20th Century Fox and Others vs Newzbin Ltd - Day 1
First day kicked off at 10:30am with the opposing barrister delivering his opening speech, which lasted about 3 hours. Apart from mostly being full of how evil we are, he explained, mostly for the Judge, Justice Kitchin, what Usenet is, what Newzbin is, what NZB files are, how they compare to hyperlinks [at great pains to try and convince him they are technically different], some accusations about our header fetching backend code [it's apparently designed to go looking for copyrighted stuff on Usenet specifically].
Our opening argument was blissfully short by comparison and stated only that we dispute nearly everything they say and we'll cover it in the evidence to come.
The second part of the day consisted of witnesses for the claimants, which for the most part were pretty insignificant - a couple of FACT agents who didn't have much to say under cross-examination apart from they did a half-assed job analysing our site.. Some junior lawyers who confirmed they
had harvested data from our listings but didn't bother to check how much of it was actually under any form of copyright.
Their star of the show, an expert witness was cross-examined for the last hour, covering topics including the dangers of auto-opening NZB files [he admitted a malicious NZB file might be a virus and auto-opening it in a browser could lead to a user being infected by a virus], discussing the
various reasons that binary headers and text-digest headers are treated separately in the backend [performance reasons, and they're handled differently until repors are created at the final step, at which point the two types of reports converge into one common database again].
Thankfully the Judge Justice Kitchin is remarkably on the ball and switched on - if nothing else this will be a very fair trial and already the opposing barrister has been pulled up on several points of contention - this Judge certainly won't blindly eat everything he's told by the MPA. on the other hand it doesn't mean he'll accept our arguments easily either.
Court adjourned at 4:30pm. The trial continues.. |
