Re: who owns newsgroup discussion thread?

On 10/22/1999, John R. Levine <johnl[_at_]iecc.com> wrote:
>
> Back in the early 1980s, usenet admins all knew that uunet (which
> started as a mail and news hub to connect dialup uucp systems to
> the Internet) provided a usenet feed to the FBI on magtape. The
> intent wasn't notably sinister, the fibbies wanted to read the tech
> gossip on the net just like everyone else, and the FBI had a well-
> founded reluctance to put modems on their systems accessible from
> the outside. But we always assumed the tapes went into the vault
> after they were copied to the FBI's local news servers. There were
> other magtape feeds to places like Malaysia where a dialup phone
> connection to download news just wasn't practical, so they got tapes
> by airfreight and sent back their responses over the phone, often a
> month after the thread had been forgotten by everyone else.

I don't think that, even if posters to usenet knew that their postings were sent to the FBI and Malaysia on magtape -- and I don't think most posters knew this -- it would constitute an implied license to the world to republish those postings for financial gain.

> Also, back when usenet volume was more managable, there was at least
> one company that made CD-ROMs with the week's usenet, again for people
> who didn't have phone access. We weren't thrilled, but it was more
> because the CD-ROM vendors were making money off what was then a
> cooperative network, not because we thought the messages were secret.

Again, I don't think that the fact that the CD-ROM company was engaging in these activities legitimizes what Deja is doing. Rather, to me, it suggests that this CD-ROM company, like Deja, was just infringing copyrights all over the place. The fact that a few system administrators knew that this was going on does not create an implied license from Joe Messageposter.

> The only thing that Deja is doing that's unusual is making the
> collection of old news easier to search. But it's a matter of degree,
> it's not anything notably new.

What's a little bit different about it is the direct financial benefit that Deja is reaping through republishing these old messages that were created by people who, in many cases, thought that they were simply participating in a community, not generating marketable "content" for others to profit by.

Although may of the individual usenet groups have websites maintained by some volunteer at which you can search for old messages (or have email services so you can fetch archives), these services typically incur expenses rather than revenues, and at least make noise about being for "educational purposes" and the like.

-A

Ari Kahan
<akahan[_at_]netcom.com>