Want the Sith DVD? Go to Usenet

Usenet newsgroups dedicated to piracy are seeing a resurgence in activity as file sharers seek less-policed areas of the internet to trade illegal data.

Some pirated movies are now even appearing in newsgroups before being released worldwide across popular P2P systems like BitTorrent. The alt.binaries newsgroups -- which mostly carry pirated software, ripped movies and MP3s -- have logged a steady and substantial rise in traffic over the last few years.

Posts to a key "warez" newsgroup, alt.binaries.multimedia, have quadrupled from 700,000 in 2001 to 2.8 million last year, according to Microsoft's Netscan System, which logs all Usenet traffic.

Meanwhile, more than 60 GB of complete DVD rips are now being posted each day to a single Usenet forum, according to stats at NewsAdmin, which tracks Usenet usage.

Many pirates are being driven to Usenet by the threat of lawsuits or by fear that their ISPs will soon be slapped with subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America.

Newsgroups offer relative anonymity compared to Kazaa, eMule and BitTorrent, which are now heavily monitored by the RIAA and MPAA.

In the '90s, the alt.binaries newsgroups formed a key part of the underground "warez" piracy scene, offering scads of illegal software and music for download. But Usenet has always been regarded as a poor man's piracy resource, thanks to its unreliability and lumbering performance. Posts to this dinosaur of a P2P system take days to ripple across a planet-wide network of news servers.

Additionally, each file posted to the system must be split into separate parts, thanks to an inherent 10,000-line limit on each post. For a 700-MB DivX movie of, say, Revenge of the Sith, that means thousands of parts must be collated and reassembled by the diligent downloader. If just one is missing, the file is garbage.

And parts do go missing all the time, routinely lost or often indiscriminately auto-deleted by servers trying to save disk space. Successful downloading depends on luck and the quality of your news server.

But a recent open-source technology, the NZB file, solves this age-old problem. Developed by Usenet indexing site Newzbin, the XML file permits the automatic gathering of scattered parts of Usenet postings.