Yesterday, the trial of Newzbin vs. the MPA concluded. The Newzbin team had just one day to use their augmented legal team in the courtroom. But now that at least this part of the trial is over, we are left to wait and speculate what the outcome will be.

There are two facts that no matter what the judge rules, will remain constant: 1) Newzbin.com will remain online, and 2) the users of the site will remain safe from the clutches of copyright enforcement. Although initially this trial seemed more similar to OinK, it appears the outcome may be more in line with the result of Mininova.

Like Mininova, the MPA isn't looking to bust Newzbin, have the site removed, or nail its user base. According to Alexa.com, a site that (for better or worse) tracks the popularity trends of websites, Newzbin ranks at approximately 5,600 - in other words, it's the 5,600th most popular website in the world. Rather impressive.

Newzbin isn't relegating themselves to defeat, but they're staying well-grounded. Realizing that there are many possibilities to the outcome, Newzbin announced today their feeling on the potential results.

"The trial restarted on the Tuesday the 2nd March and finished yesterday the third. It's always difficult trying to guess what a judge is thinking as his questions and comments, where probing of either parties submissions, may be no more than professionally required scepticism. Nonetheless, here is our guess.

"Our hunch is that they will fail on some of their assertions but will probably win on others. They may not be able to prove damage or loss from copying, but they may convince the court we have facilitated others in obtaining their works.

"If they win then, as we said in a previous news story, Newzbin will not be shut down. In all probability there will be 'enquiry as to damages' (the legal expression) and a new mini-trial over the terms of an injunction compelling us to block material of the Claimants. For example we may be required to develop filter mechanisms. At the moment we remain unfiltered and we would fight for the current notice and take down system that we already use. Again this is just our best guess and we may be well wide of the mark."

So what are we looking at here? It wouldn't surprise us if Newzbin has to implement some kind of filtering device like Mininova did - although Mininova's filtering method consisted of completely eliminating their entire torrent index, save the CDN (Content Distribution Network) torrents. Will a Newzbin morph into a site that resembles Mininova? Probably...and doing so isn't necessarily a death sentence, as Mininova has proved.

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