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.