Re: who owns newsgroup discussion thread?

On 10/19/1999, Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Ari Kahan <akahan[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > Deja News itself has simply chosen to infringe hundreds of thousands
> > of copyrights daily, for commercial gain. No ifs ands or buts.
>
> Any commercial ISP who offers USENET access is also dispensing zillions
> of news articles per day, for which they generally do not hold copyright,
> and have no explicit license from the authors to copy. They also do this
> for commercial gain; charging their users a monthly fee for this service.
>
> What is DejaNews.com doing (other than keeping the articles visible
> for longer, providing a better indexing system, and not charging you
> $30/mo) that Netcom/Mindspring is not also doing?

DejaNews is gathering up ancient Usenet posts, made at a time when everyone understood that postings to Usenet were relatively transitory, dropping out of existence within a reasonable amount of time (usually a few weeks, depending on the traffic on the particular newsgroup), and is retaining and republishing those postings. To the extent there was any implied license granted by the act of posting to Usenet, Deja is substantially exceeding its contours.

-A

Ari Kahan
<akahan[_at_]netcom.com>