Re: who owns newsgroup discussion thread?

From: Mark Lemley <MLEMLEY[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 09:47:03 -0600

On 10/25/1999, Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Ari Kahan <akahan[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > it shouldn't be necessary to ask an infringer to stop
> > infringing; they shouldn't do it in the first place.
>
> But no court has ever ruled that archiving USENET articles is
> infringement. I would argue DejaNews, Yahoo, Altavista, Zippo,
> et al. have an implied license to do so, based upon what the
> average poster expects.
>

[snip]
>
> Do you honestly think humans read every post? Even if they had
> a staff of a thousand copyright-checkers, they couldn't keep up.
> That's why their machines look for the X-No-Archive tag; and I'm
> sorry to hear it doesn't always catch every last article of yours.
>
> They are not causing you any damages, and yet you demand they
> stop providing an invaluable and free-of-charge public service.
>
> Fine. If need be, we can abandon USENET, and create a parallel
> hierarchy, where all newsgroups are explicitly chartered to be
> public-domain only. Posts with angry two-page copyright notices
> will be summarily thrown in the trash, alongside the sex ads and
> the get-rich-quick schemes.
>

---

It's a bit disingenuous to say that no court has ever found archiving Usenet posts to be infringement. No court has ever found the opposite, either, because AFAIK no court has ever considered the issue.

I think perhaps the two of you are approaching this from different perspectives. Ari is probably right that what DejaNews does is massive copyright infringement, and that if somebody decided to sue them they would lose. Lance is probably right that DejaNews provides a valuable public service, and that that legal result would be a bad thing. This isn't the only case in history where copyright law leads us to a troubling result.

Mark A. Lemley         http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/mlemley/index.html
Marrs McLean Professor of Law                   mlemley[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu

University of Texas School of Law
Of Counsel, Fish & Richardson, P.C.

Effective December 1, I will be a Professor of Law at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley. Received on Tue Oct 26 1999 - 14:45:23 GMT