RIAA Sues Usenet
 

It was bound to happen sooner or later, a matter of when, not if. The dreaded day has arrived and as hard as it may be for Usenet junkies to contemplate, the old and beloved service, which swarms petabytes of content almost daily, has met the foes that could conceivably reduce its output to a trickle: the US courts and the international recording industry. Or maybe not. The RIAA has announced a lawsuit (167 pg. pdf) against a branch of the system accusing operators of massive copyright violations and generally poor behaviour - but the amorphous nature of a newsgroup, dreamed up nearly thirty years ago by two grad students, makes it a lot tougher to control than a more typical semi decentralised P2P operation like Fasttrack or the newer Bittorrent trackers like the Piratebay, and if the courts came down hard on Fasttrack the record companies haven't had much luck lately shutting those other sites down.

When dealing with platforms as opposed to individuals however international courts have generally ignored bedrock legal principals such as who is actually infringing, considering these mere technical trifles, preferring instead to find copyright violations anytime there may be unauthorised distribution, no matter how far removed from the defendant it is. In the states this means the US arms of an organisation would likely be found liable, spelling potential headaches for North Dakota's Usenet.com specifically or any US-based operations feeding the giant newsgroup.

- js.

it seems to me that the ISP's are more directly complicit in Usenet d/l'ing than any other method, since you log onto your ISP's news server to get the goodies via Usenet. i've often why this day hasn't come sooner and why the entertainment industry doesn't lay this issue directly on the ISP's doorstep. it's the ISP who is actually hosting the files in question, no?

until several years when most swapped content still consisted of small text files (news & info) the answer to that would have been yes, but like file-sharing in general things changed for newsgroups. when bandwidth consumption skyrocketed and copyright cartel pressure increased, isps began restricting access to the networks after subscribers got into binary groups specializing in copies of large retail media files. now companies like usenet.com host some content on their own servers, "facilitate access" to still more, and sell this service directly to users at a profit, usually on a sliding scale where customers pay more for getting more, with usenet.com's revenues increasing proportionally as file sizes swell, like text to mp3 to avi. needless to say essentially all of this content is produced by media cartels and not usenet.com.

- js.

it's been a minute since i had a buffet meal @ the usenet 24 hour bar and grill :drool: .

it was/is always good to know it's there in a pinch.......an option and a relatively safe one at that.

now they want to kill this too.

grrrrrrrrrr.............