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The Dutch anti-piracy team BREIN has claimed another victory on the piracy front. The Usenet indexing site NZBXS.com agreed to voluntarily shut down but, as part of a confidential agreement, BREIN also received personal data from the site's API users, who can expect to receive a message from the anti-piracy group in the near future.
The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has targeted pirates of all shapes and sizes for the past two decades.
It is also one of the few groups that systematically tracks copyright infringers on Usenet, one of the oldest file-sharing systems that still has millions of users.
BRAIN has a long history of going after Usenet indexing sites. These portals do not host any infringing material on their servers, but, like torrent sites, they offer NZB files or "points" that make infringing material easy to find on Usenet.
Close NZBXS 'Hobby Project'
This week, the anti-piracy group reports another victory in this battle. BREIN located the operator or NZBXS.com that agreed to resolve the matter out of court and shut down the website.
NZBXS.com was a small site with 'only' a few thousand visitors per month. The site operator said the site was simply a hobby project. However, BREIN emphasizes that these hobbies can be problematic.
โIt was supposed to be a hobby project, but with thousands of visitors a month, there is still considerable damage. As previously ruled by a judge: an illegal hobby is also illegal, โsays BREIN.
This type of enforcement action is nothing new for BREIN. The organization, representing rights holders from various industries, is the driving force behind hundreds of closures every year. That being said, this one also comes with a surprise for site users.
BREIN has user details
As part of the agreement, the operator of NZBXS.com agreed to share information about users of the site.
The site allowed users to register an account so they could access the API, which connected to PVR and external media download tools like Sickbeard, RADARR, and CouchPotato. These users can expect to receive a message from BREIN.
"We will send a message to the few hundred members who had an API key," says BREIN Director Tim Kuik.
Kuik did not share any details on what this message will look like as it may differ based on the evidence. However, NZBXS users can, at a minimum, wait for a warning that their records will also remain archived for a year, to check if they continue any illegal activity.
At the time of writing, the NZBXS.com website is truly offline. There is no official closure notice. Instead, the domain shows a Cloudflare error, indicating that the server is unavailable.
