There’s very little information coming out of the High Court case between Usenet indexing site Newzbin and their opponents from the MPA. A couple of updates on the Newzbin site point to a somewhat confused situation.
In 2008, Newzbin received complaints from the MPA who later in the year filed for an injunction against the site. (case background here)
The showdown in London’s High Court before Mr Justice Kitchin began last week but after the first day, reporting by Newzbin went a little quiet.
Since then there have been two updates by the company. Day 3 first;
There have been bizarre side issues which have emerged. To be fair to the MPA (god, we never thought we’d ever say that!) it was out of their control and down to internal Newzbin issues. Combined with Caesium falling ill during cross-examination by the opposing barrister, this has caused a delay and things are a bit of a shambles at the moment.
Quite what happens next week when the trial restarts is unclear and there may be more delays. Times are getting interesting: in a Chinese sense.
Caesium’s health aside, the update for Day 4 paints a pretty gloomy picture.
A refreshed Caesium finished cross examination today.
There have been/are huge procedural complications caused by Newzbin’s internal issues and this may cause delays in the case being concluded this week.
It would be fair to say that the picture painted in court of Newzbin has not been an entirely positive one. Whilst it is hard to double guess Mr Justice Kitchin, Newzbin may have some difficulties in the near future.
Caesium was accused of lying massively and repeatedly under oath and ‘concocting’ a phoney defence: ‘Bollocks’ we said, a technical latin legal expression, but nonetheless a problematic accusation.
We may be being paranoid, but at the moment our hunch is that things are looking less positive for us than last week. We hope we are wrong.
Other than these updates, Newzbin isn’t commenting on the case directly and the MPA told us they could not comment on an ongoing case, so providing more detailed coverage is proving problematic.
Article from: FreakBits