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Google Owns Your UseNet Post
michaelmalak writes: "Google Groups, the deja.com replacement, now supports posting of articles. But be careful, because in posting you grant Google a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license." I noticed that UseNet volumes went down significantly when Remarq and then Deja went down. Then volumes went down again in the traditional slowing accompanied by college summer recess. If volume is to pick up, it will likely come from those using Google's posting service, rather than an unreliable or unavailable (esp. in the case of AOL) ISP news server. So it would seem UseNet is not going to die, it just got bought out like everything else these days."
The paragraph reads in full:
"By posting communications on or through the Service, you automatically grant Google a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the communication alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees."
Individuals also have the right to nuke their own posts, though, and to specify 'X-No-archive: yes.'
CHRIST, man it's "non", not "none". You got it wrong every fucking time.
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/06/07/linux/
no joke!
A little Ot but I am hoping that maybe some google people may see this post; they sure as hell don't reply to email. I still extensively use my my-deja. email account. Besides offering existing my-deja account holders to close their accounts googles has said nothing about what will eventually happen to them. I know that there are a great many people still using these accounts and would like to hear some sort of answer on this.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Not quite. ANYONE can do anything with the post. Not just the "copyright holder". Why is that in quotes? Because there is no copyright on USENET posts!
It's the nature of the beast. When you voluntarily post to a PUBLIC forum, you are then and there decreeing your words to be in the public domain, yes? Thus, copyright no longer applies. And neither does "default" copyright apply because you physically placed your words into a PUBLIC forum. You knew what you were doing. You clearly chose to relinquish eternally all copyright to your article.
Wanna stay copyrighted and propietary? Post your words on your own web page and put a link in the newsgroup. Note that the link will be public domain, so don't whine about "deep linking" violations. Of course few to none may read your words then. Want a wide audience? Pay the price. Give up the (C). And welcome to real life.
In a word, YES!
Casca
Why can't the readers rate the lead article postings the same as the follow-ups?
In the meantime, is /. going through some sort of cash-crunch, gotta up those pageviews? It's almost as bad as when PC Mag's Fred Langa bashes Linux just to get some action going.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Google is essentially a web-based frontend for the newsgroups, which doesn't even explain to users what USENET is, how or why it's different from the Internet, or that USENET isn't just a bunch of chat room type thingies hosted at Google.
.
Take a look at http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/basics.html
Actually, why not just put a small Free Content license at the bottom of your post giving *everyone* the right to distribute and modify?
http://www.xtdnet.nl/paul/deja/
I've already gone through this with Deja. Guess
I will start again with Google.
Usenet is not fading away, you're just reading the wrong groups. The NGs that I read the most still have a fairly high signal/noise ratio without being moderated. As to which groups I read, I'll just say that I'm a model railroader, and I read and contribute in groups about trains, railroads and models.
Then scroll to the bottom of the page.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I admit the situation looks bleak. Most ISPs aren't in exactly the best financial state and text-only Usenet appeals to such a small number of users that it's almost inevitable it will go away unless folks call and complain when it does. (My news server went down for a week, which at least was an opportunity to go on record with my ISP).
Furthermore, there's thousands of groups which get 0 traffic (.bork.bork groups which got a 5 second laugh from someone in 1993 and the like are still there!) and there's apparently no cabal going around and voting those groups out of existance. From the harried ISP SA point-of-view, the entire thing must seem decrepit and unmanaged.
Maybe the easy solution for the binaries problem is to just press the Off button on the news server, but hopefully they'll have more insight than that. Binary distribution via news can work, but only if it's limited to a very small number of servers with large interconnects. Unfortunately, huge ISPs such as @home don't want to make a special case of binary news, probably because it would draw attention to the fact that almost everything there is illegal.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
So, how many universities out there ever thought to backup their news servers?
Wouldn't it really frost Google if a distributed usenet archive were to rise from the ashes?
I have some massive Hardware and Diskspace just sitting around gathering dust now that the internet bubble has burst. Anyone care to make some archived posting donations?
comment directly in my journal
If you don't want Google to be the only one doing this, why don't you create your own archive? They're the ones spending the bucks for it, and obviously other companies didn't find it financially worth the effort. Just be happy that there's a company doing this instead of raising all these paranoid issues about them. They're not some fucking charity for you to leech off of, and if there's no way for them to make money off of it, they might as well shut the whole damn thing down. And the minute they did, I bet you would be here bitching about the lack of any good usenet archives. I'm really not trying to offend you, but this whole story is one of the more ridiculous ones that Slashdot has posted lately, and that's freakin' saying something.
Cheers,
Why don't you just use the X-No-Arvhive header instead of messing around with all that bullshit you just wrote?
Cheers,
I think Google uses about 3600 servers, maybe 4000. Good luck.
Cheers,
Yep, I think you're right. Thinking about it some more, I believe they recently bought 3600 systems, which was supposedly a doubling of how many they already had. Thanks.
Cheers,
Don't be so sure that it's not a valid contract.
Contracts are made in many ways, sometimes by custom. Custom, by the way, would be something like unjust enrichment: You watch a housepainter paint your house by mistake, never saying a word for the three days that he comes and works. When he presents the bill, you tell him about his mistake and refuse to pay. He could take you to court and win.
First, though, your stuff doesn't become public domain unless you explicitly make it so. Google only claims a non-exclusive license, which is a sort of IP "default" in the absence of explicit agreements.
All of the necessary elements for a contract arguably are there. There certainly are multiple parties. In the case of posting through Google, it's Google. Consideration comes in the form of being allowed to post to the newsgroup and having your posting accepted -- even if its fully automatic. Somebody is running those servers.
By posting something, you agree by implication, to make your posting available to anyone who reads the newsgroup postings.
That's pretty close to the definition of a non-exclusive license to distribute your posting.
I suppose you could even try the house-painter's argument: It would be unjust if you could take advantage of all those services for free, without granting that minimal level of rights (in the form of the non-exclusive license) needed to make the service reasonable.
Google does, however, choose to provide a service whereby people who affirm that they were the author of a post may have that post 'nuked'. See Google's Usenet help, item 13.
No... but Google is good cause it uses linux while microsoft is evil..
UseNet has grown to the point that smaller ISPs seem to offer quite sucky newsfeeds on account of the volume. A couple of years back, a group of us had problems with articles expirng before they made it off the ISPs news spool. The only way to reliably propagate articles was to go via Deja. This suited the ISPs because it was a lot less hassle to them than chewing more disk/bandwidth.
/dev/null, and a public infrastructure becomes a private asset. Taking the cost of maintaining news spool from ISPs is a great way of achieving just that. Imagine if M$ then bought UseNet from Google and "enhanced" it.
Now we already have the situation where UseNet is Deja (Google) for most people. Where does Google get its news from now? How about a year from now when (hypothetically) they have the lions share of traffic? Will they resist the urge to set up policies that cement their position?
For example, giving preference to articles originating from Google or affiliated ISPs (negating the need for ISPs to maintain their own spools)?
I am concerned that we'll see a UseNet where posting outside Google affiliated channels is as good as posting to
NOTE: I am *NOT* saying that this is happening now, but I cannot see why it couldn't happen.
On a side note, can I set up a web-proxy that honours "no proxy" and claim that any Google traffic passing through it is using my faciltiies to improve their customer's enjoyment of the service, and therefore I get a non exclusive licence to Google/usenet too?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
So if you post the DeCSS code via Google, whom do the laywers target? If not Google, what if we _all_ posted it using Google?
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
If you have something that you want to post but maintain the copyright to, I sugest you post your article (and copyright notice) on the web and then make a usenet post with a URL.
Of course it's a plot to make all our pr0n belong to the $epublicans! Why else would English professors be obsessing about phallic symbols and bathroom tile? :)
Ontopic site worth a look.
10 Big Myths about copyright explained
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
it seems to me that google is doing the minimum possible to make sure that they have the right to publish your post. what's wrong with that?
nobody
parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus
Oh my God! You're kidding!
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Uh, huh. Usenet is an open protocol. There is nothing to stop anyone at any time from hooking into it however they want. Have we all forgotten how to set up our own news servers? Is everyone clueless enough to think they have to depend on an ISP or a particular "portal" to do something so very basic?
If we become people who are that clueless then we will deserve to have Usenet be "controlled" by some one company.
Not quite. I do think this article is overblown, but I certainly don't expect Google or anyone else to modify or edit my posts. (Of course, I'd never use Google to post messages anyway.)
Let us assume you write a story -- a really wonderful and remarkable story -- and you post it on Usenet through google in an obscure little group. Never-the-less a major publisher sees it and loves it and wants to publish it and you're gonna be rich and famous.
Well now there's a problem because google can publish it too. They can use your own material to publish in competition with you.
Of course this is a mountain out of a molehill, the price of using google for important posts is too high so you use another service (like your ISP). Of far greater concern is, like deja before it, Google is nothing but a giant copyright suit waiting to happen because it stores, in perpetuity the posts of hundreds of thousands of people without their consent, publishing, altering them, bannerizing them, and republishing them every single day.
Even if you have never used the google service and granted them permission to use your post. No matter how strongly you feel that your words are your own and that you have the right to decide how those words are used now and in the future, google has decideed that all your posts belong to them to use as they see fit.
Google is a great service yes, but then so was Napster. The only difference is that this time its US making the "music".
Personally, I find it interesting that this problem exists at all. I think the largest factor is the trend towards the web browser as the "swiss army knife" of the Internet. Internet newbies only want 2 things; email and web access. Services like Deja or Google serve as bridges to introduce all of these people to the world of Usenet. This is fine, but it never teaches them to think of Usenet as a service they can directly connect to with their choice of software packages. (I think you'd see the exact same thing happen with email, except Microsoft includes Outlook Express as a seperate program with every copy of Windows, and the setup wizard offers to create you a "mail account". Notice that it never offers to set up your "news account" automatically, though.)
ISP's could go a long way towards bringing their customers back to using their Usenet news servers if they offered a web-based front-end to them. (Anyone know if Linux has such a package available?)
I don't the people behind Google are just covering their asses. After all, a variation of this disclaimer which would limit the use of the postings to the Google Groups service (i.e. Usenet search and presentation over the Web) would do that as well, and the majority of postings served by Google Groups has not been posted through their interface. Perhaps they think that there might be an additional use of the postings injected through their infrastructure in the future, such as publishing a book. For postings of their customers, they would have the necessary license to do that, but I know of several people who would be very, very upset if their valueable Usenet postings show up in books without compensation for them.
Finally, it is quite customary to post copyrighted material for which one doesn't have the full rights under copyright, for example excerpts from GPLed source code written by other people or short quotes from your favorite novel.
Individuals have a right to the pursuit of happiness, which may include the pursuit of profit, but no one has to "right" to succeed in that pursuit.
It's not just a usenet problem. Recently we had a very interesting discussion about non-exclusive licenses in the context of mailing list posts, as well.
-- This is not legal advice or solicitation. See an attorney for legal advice. My views, not anyone else's..
That's quite right, and without a descent moderation system like on K5, the expression "the more the merrier" doesn't necessary hold true. So even though the growth of Usenet has been underwhelming, that might actually be a good thing and not death-cramps.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I don't think binaries ever got as popular as P2P, it's a PITA to download and reconstruct binaries and it's more for the technically elite, whereas Napster is a more user-friendly and a much more popular service.
Also you can't "shut down" USENET, it's not really a company or a service even, it's a protocol. The RIAA would have to individually go after the posters.... but you can generally hide your identity on USENET real well so that's not feasible either.
hehe seriously though, supposedly it's supposed to be you. I qoute-
Anyway, that's just my $0.02
Just because you perceive someone as being dumb, does that mean they don't deserve the same access as you, whether to the Net, the Web, or Usenet?
If only they knew the difference between Internet, WWW and UseNet. I'm all in favor of equal access to all these things, but you must admit that it's pretty damned frustrating when equal access doesn't mean equal quality, respect, or understanding.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Yes... One could say that the internet itself was better back in, say, 1995, when Yahoo and porn sites were the only commercial entities out there, but would you really want to go back, just because of a better signal-to-noise ratio?
Sure it'd be nice to nuke AOL and all its users off the face of this planet, but that's pretty elitist, you have to admit. Just because you perceive someone as being dumb, does that mean they don't deserve the same access as you, whether to the Net, the Web, or Usenet?
Timothy, if you don't understand what "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license" means (and that's understandable given the number of terms of art involved), get someone to explain it to you before posting claims about it. As has been pointed out already, such a license does not transfer ownership of the post, but simply means that you can't try to collect royalties a la Tasini v. New York Times (holding that a database of articles is a separate entity, requiring separate royalty payment). I believe recognizing the incorrect claim about what a license does falls within the concept of "basic fact checking" (which is why this is addressed to timothy and not michaelmalak).
In addition, the flamebait headlie (okay, that started out as a typo, but it's too apropos to change) is unnecessary, as the fact that Google Groups now has posting capability is sufficiently newsworthy in itself. A title like "Google Groups Implements Posting" would be a a more fair headline, and would have made a more interesting discussion possible.
Finally, a suggestion for the Powers That Be: would it be possible to add a -1, Incorrect moderation (here the article itself deserves it, but many posts do as well)? Some things that are posted aren't actually trolls or flamebait, but are just misinformed.
I use Claranews. It's a good server with an annual fee.
You get what you pay for.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
"All your post are belong to us!"
Heck, someone had to say it :-)
My sig is too lon
They are in the business of archiving, indexing, and offering search capabilities of newsgroups. Obviously, they aren't laying claim or ownership of posts that don't originate from their servers, but at the same time, they need to have some sort of legal statement in order to grant themselves the ability to perform the services they are offering.
What it boils down to is that if you don't like the terms, use an external (to google) news server. But if you do use their services, realize that anything you post is going to published, is going to be indexed, and is going to be availble for them to use.
Given the state of usenet, this is hardly a burdensome request on their part.
...sometimes i wish we could moderate the parent stories... (-1, flamebait)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I really just posted that to see if there were still any moderators lame enough to mod it up... sure enough, there were!p. I'm sorry you guys all had to suffer through my little experiment... stop whining like babies though.
Who really needs to post to usenet through google? If that's the only way you can manage to post to usenet, then perhaps you should look into a more user-friendly service; like AOL. This is NOT a big deal. Sheesh. Use x-no-archive if it bothers you that much.
(Score:-1, Flamebait)
"how gay" ---- How trite, and how lame... And no, you ignorant fool, I would not post filth like the self-styled "JewHater" does. You are quite blind to the fact that I am trying to draw him out of his mindless screed and get him to examine his circular (circular in this case is synonymous with pointless) reasoning. Nuances and subtleties are lost on you just as they seem to be lost on "JewHater".
This is actually true with every Usenet node. You could argue that such licenses are granted implicitly ba posting to Usenet.
Hoewever, Google wants more: They do also want the right to modify the message, to publish and even translate the message. They also want the right to distribute the message on other media and with yet-unknwon technology. This goes clearly too far.
Such bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour is typical for American law departments, though: Wanting to protect their company from lawsuits as much as possible, they tend to play havoc with their customers rights and feelings.
Claus
By posting something to Usenet, you are giving it away for free. If you later discover that you'd like to sell it when everyone already has a free copy - bad luck. That's not special to DejaGoogle.
Claus
cool with a stupid legal dep't
Claus
Well, it seems like a similar case to that of Passport.
But regardless, is this really a bad thing? If you are using their servers and bandwidth, then why shouldn't they be allowed to set forth whatever policies they want? If you don't like it, don't use it. Why is this such a hard concept?
--
--
#nohup cat
Giving someone a license to reproduce a copyrighted work does not transfer ownership.
Morons.
But how do I know that anonymous remailers and web proxies are not actually sting operations run by government agencies?
true, but the Google/Deja interface is a really convenient way to use Usenet. Speed, searching etc. ISP support will probably decay as you say unless newsreader software can compete with the web's advantages.
I would say that google is even more evil than microsoft, since they are using a FREE operating system as a tool for their nefarious purposes.
I suggest that we all get together, seceede from the United States and form a Free country, where every aspect of life is ruled by the GPL. If the entire society is free, than nobody can ever infringe on Linux or Usenet!!!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I'm curious, who owns a slashdot post? Since this a public forum, and many posts are archived for extended periods of time, I would like to see the Slashdot license.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Keep on making jokes like that, and I'll send you on the way to destruction so fast you won't be able to make your time!
Visit GameFAQS for great translation!
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
I can not see how this I really that any different from what has always been going on. It seems like all they are really asking is for you not to sue them for infringing on your intellectual property.
I wouldn't worry about this at all, to the average /.er who understands the idea of Usenet nothing has changed. Imagine what would happen to Goggle, and all other newsgroup providers if they were responsible for removing and policing content!/p?
You know, the one that said the same thing about everything you posted to your Yahoo! homepage?
I may be wrong, but I think they rewrote it to say clarify that it only referred to spanning your page over multiple servers.
In any event, this doesn't worry me in particular. Why? Because, don't you essentially grant those rights to everyone when you make a posting to UseNet? It's a public channel of communication, dude! And in this case, you're using Google's resources to accomplish it!
The fact that they're offering a method to remove/dissalow archiving in the first place seems to me a very good indicator that Google is playing as fair as it can under the circumstances. And if, in the end, you still don't like it, go use your ISP's newsserver.
As long as it's a non-exclusive license, who cares? I mean, if they didn't have the ability to do this, then how could they archive usenet? As long as Google doesn't try to tell other archivers that they can't keep copies for their own purposes, I don't see a problem here.
Still, I wonder what would happen if someone tried to assert copyright and ownership over their own usenet posts. Could you append a (C) notice in your .sig and expect that to stand up in a court somewhere? Could you fire off a cease and desist order to Usenet servers and archives the world over demanding that your posts be removed and deleted? What about individuals who might happen to keep a personal copy of your post for whatever reason?
I guess the really big question is how much are they going to charge you for the service of erasing the historical record of your public speech? And, once this sort of revisionism becomes a commodity that anyone can buy, who'll be the biggest spenders?
----
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I don't want to sound like the devil's advocate but we were almost on the verge of getting such terms from Microsoft. Windows XP uses Passport authentication to log in to your workstation. While this was primarily used to sync your mail from hotmail and other Microsoft online services, it also gave Passport (a Microsoft affiliate) to own all your documents. In a twisted way, this actually implies what you have just denied. Don't bet all your horses on your claim dude.
Dodge this !! --Trinity, The Matrix
Actually, "happiness" as used in the US Constitution is defined as "the ownership of property".
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
You don't have to use Google to post to Usenet, but if you choose to you've got to follow their rules. What's wrong with that? It's no different from me saying that while I don't think smoking should be illegal, if you enter my house you can't smoke. You don't have to enter my house, but if you do (provided I allow you to) you've got to follow my rules.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Just stop it.
Google wants to ARCHIVE things.
Just like DejaNews did.
To do so, they feel that they need "permission".
There is no harm in Google asking for a NON-EXCLUSIVE
license to simply keep a copy of your posting.
They are simply establishing a legal basis for doing so.
I remember a time long ago (1970ish) when UseNet
was full of stuff WORTH archiving.
(Most of you little brats were not even BORN at that point!)
I'm happy the Google will try to archive it all,
so one can keyword search one's way through the
festering cesspool that UseNET has become to find
the 1% of postings that are worth reading.
Science is the art of infallibility, perpetrated upon non-scientists
>If volume is to pick up, it will likely come
>from those using Google's posting service,
>rather than an unreliable or unavailable (esp.
>in the case of AOL) ISP news server.
You forgot to mention that there are numerous companies whose sole business model is to provide you with Usenet access. Forget Google, and forget your ISP, get one of the premium news services.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
All this license does is cover Google when they do the good things they do, like archive the post, reformat it in html, index it for searching, store it on their servers.
If you don't like it, post your message from one of those other unreliable hosts.
-- kai
Verbing Weirds Language.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
On the question of whether Google (or any other organization that happens to own a news server) could enforce the language of a newsgroup charter, I don't see it. They aren't the ones who wrote the charter, and the only agreements they have with their users are those the user "signed" to get access through them. Remember, you can't sue to enforce a contract to which you aren't a party -- so even if there is some nebulous contract there between the poster and "the Usenet community," there isn't anyone with a right to enforce it.
Did you read the newsgroup charter before you posted? Oops. Looks like you agreed to its terms by posting and gave up copyright on your article, eh?
I'm pretty confident that those charters aren't valid legal contracts. The law only recognizes an agreement as a valid, i.e. legally enforceable, contract if it meets certain standards. A newsgroup charter fails to meet those standards in a number of ways. There's no formal agreement on my part, not even a "Click 'I Agree' to continue" kind of thing. There's no second party (a contract has to be between multiple parties). There's no consideration (the give and take required by contract law), because I'm not getting anything in exchange for supposedly agreeing to place my material in the public domain. You could claim I'm getting access to Usenet, but since nobody owns Usenet, nobody can "give" me that access in exchange for making my work public domain. The rules for legal contracts are complex, and the charters don't make the cut.Even if they were somehow valid contracts, there's another problem. Since most newgroup posters wouldn't even know where to find the charters, much less be aware that they affect their IP rights, the charters would fail as "contracts of adhesion" -- basically, contracts that one party didn't realize they were agreeing to.
Good.
What the fuck is wrong with that?
Bandwidth costs money.
What the fuck is wrong with the people in this cuntry, that they expect everything to be fucking handed to them on a fucking silver platter?Hardware costs money.
A building full of H1B workers costs a little money, too.
If you think Google|Microsoft|AOL|Intel|Digital Convergence is so wrong, then fucking do it yourself, for FREE!
You're right about the RIAA, though. They suck.
--
--
You are a fucking moron.
I remember this in hotmail... does it never end :(
/.
;)
S C
There even was a guy who created a "email license agreement" and posted that IIRC here on
I'll now go and put some lines beyond my posts (not every but the more inportant) which leads (by URI) to _my_ license.
It is that _my_ license is compatible to the paragraph quoted but also says it _must_ be sublicensed under my license
For the interested:
http://members.tripod.de/mirabilos/pub/OWL_R2.A
type=text/plain; charset=ISO_646.irv:1991
CR-LF line endings, 2048 bytes.
OSI approval pending (but they're overloaded anyway)
--
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Oh god, yes, please bash google for finally offering a way to post to usenet again. Can't you guys concentrate on AOL, RIAA or something liket this? Nothing to see here, please go away... *sigh*
"Any one of the millions of posters on Usenet could potentially sue them for including their posts in their archives. Including that clause just make it less likely that something like that will happen."
---
Millions still can; Google is at best protecting themselves from people posting _using Google_. All the other posters possess the right to rescind Google's ability to distribute copies of their messages at any given time. There was a day in which Google would voluntarily purge any message in their system at the request of the poster; such a policy is prudent.
----
"Usenet posts are a fairly grey area when it comes to copyright law... "
----
Only if you believe that arbitrary redistribution constitutes "fair use".
C//
Google is one of the very few companies that doesn't give me this "we're an evil corporation" feel. Call me wacky, call me naive, but I for some reason trust them. :)
BytesTemplar.com
OK, let me translate this to plain english:
We own the server that it's posted through. Therefore, we can post your post to the rest of the world. We can use it in basically any way we see fit to transmit your post. Of course, you wouldn't be using UseNet news if you didn't want your goddamn post publicly shown, eh?
Or, as the one reply that I did bother to read:
What exactly is the problem here?
Until today, I actually thought all the people trashtalking the guys that post this stuff to news were just people with bugs up their arses. Now I am seeing how bad some of the submissions that get through are.
By the way, why on earth is Slashdot so slow? Have we been in turn, Slashdotted???
All your base are belong to XO
http://mi-net.dynup.net/
http://blackmagik.dynup.net/
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
You could write any sort of inflamatory/libeleous garbage in a post on Google and it's their fault?
Two edged sword and all that.
Id be very curious what happened if I posted my usenet contributions via ISP with a disclaimer like that: "This posting is under my personal and intellectual property. It is under no circumstances granted to be indexed, hosted or archived by any Google related organisation or technology without explicit permission." If lots of people put a legal disclaimer in their postings, some googles might start sweatening :-)
Note: I am not against Google or the usenet archive but this point here is starting to worry me...
Oliver
From the top of the comments page for any story:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Slashdot is not responsible for what they say.
What do you think?
Bad Spellers of the world UNTIE!!
They reserved the right to modify.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Usenet is exteremly popular, if a profit can be made from it, then Google has the right to make one. They can charge you a fee if they want, you don't have to go there. An example, if you decided to post an entire prog that you yourself created, Google owns it. What you say on Google, they own it.
But then again, MS technically owns all the progs you write when you run windows <shrug>.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Money does not buy happiness, but it can make my happy to have that nice mp3 player from thinkgeek.
I can make a profit if i want to, just have to put some effort into it. But if being happy is being profitable, so be it.
Its how the market works. Just a thought
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
> Why would Google make this request? I would guess to defend themselves legally
Another reason -- by doing so, they eliminate a poster's right to demand that a message be removed from the archive, since by posting it, you've given them right to store it there in a way that can't be revoked. Given the size of their data store, this removes a potentially huge administrative headache.
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome = When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell
In this case, Google is just trying to protect themselves from a potentially huge liability. The manner in which they chose to reduce this risk is a little excessive, but legally it was the easiest, safest way to do this.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
No, you neither...
Strange thing, but am I the only person to care more about my usenet posts being sufficiently anonymous than about giving away my rights of ownership? Like, oops, I just noticed I posted a brilliant idea, give me back my copyright? You should have thought about that before hitting submit I'd say.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
So let me get this straight. Music and source code should be free, but everyone should own exclusive rights to their usenet posts. Riiight...
trollbiters like you are a dime a dozen. YHBT, and HAND, 4minus0.
So then...
"All your posts are not belong to us"
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Agh, I feel quite the fool. I'm so adept at filtering out copyright notices that I didn't even realize that that was down there.
By using a super computer analyzing usenet posts, they'll determine analytically which Startrek captain is the best.
God spoke to me
ahem that should read: "continues to make moronic plays on phrases..." but, since an AC FUCKWIT here is too stupid to realize this, he continues to make moronic plays on phrases that blah blah fucking blah.
maybe before you trash someone else's spelling you should pay a little more attention to your own, you mook.
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
I suggest that we all get together, seceede from the United States and form a Free country, where every aspect of life is ruled by the GPL.
In Congress, July 4, 2001
... We hold these truths to be self evident, that Microsoft is created evil, that Software is endowed by its Creator with certain unalienable Bugs, that among these are Fencepost Errors, Memory Allocation Problems, and Awkward User Interfaces. -- That to fix these Bugs, Geeks are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the GNU Public Licence ...
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
So don't post through Google if you don't like it. They are putting up a clear and simple statment about their policy. I say that they re being very fair. And it's not like you can't find a million other servers through which to post to the Usenet.
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
> The problem comes in only if the prediction I made comes true: that Google Groups grows to
> become the primary way for people to post to UseNet due to continuing decay of ISP support
> for UseNet.
Umm, who cares if Google, AOL, or MSN, or my local dentist becomes the primary way to access USENET? By its nature and design, there will always be other ways to access USENET since USENET is not controlled locally, nor could it be unless the whole system were redesigned from the ground up, in which case it would be something other than USENET and the old USENET would go on.
See, ISP support for USENET is unimportant. I know of *no* ISPs which have good USENET support. No one I know of who cares enough about USENET to be a major contributor actually uses his ISP as his primary access. We use "premium" USENET services for pay, and/or free accounts through big servers that offer remote accounts. That's because few if any ISPs have good feeds with high retentions.
USENET is not and will never be the Internet, so it is understandable and reasonable to get access from someone other than your ISP. Google is merely one way to do this, and as far as I'm concerned it promotes involvement by lamebrains who couldn't otherwise get real access.
Google is essentially a web-based frontend for the newsgroups, which doesn't even explain to users what USENET is, how or why it's different from the Internet, or that USENET isn't just a bunch of chat room type thingies hosted at Google. Serious USENET users already pony up a small, very affordable unless you're well below the poverty line, monthly fee to a commercial server for a good feed and long retention. For example, I have had at times an account with Altopia, Easynews, or The Slurp (back when it offered individual accounts, which it no longer does).
In addition, I know of a few free servers which offer free SLIP accounts with access to news feeds.
None of this is going away any time soon. Just because one free service has offered free accounts which now have more restricvtions, has no impact whatsoever.
And as far as I'm concerned, I wish Google/Deja would have stopped allowing free posting privileges. In my experience, for every guy like you who probably uses his account for positive contributions, there are a couple hundred AOL type guys who have no idea what USENET is who use their accounts for bandwidth-and-storage-wasting me-toos and attempts to meet "13 year old" FBI agents.
I wish USENET were only the domain of people who know what NNTP is. It may be elitist and politically incorrect for me to say it, but it's my honest opinion and if it were the way things are, if services like Google didn't allow free and simplified Web-based posting, then 90% of the clueless and always will be clueless contingent wouldn't bother with USENET, leaving it for the clueful and willing-to-learn-cluefulness and the spammers who would dry up a bit since most of their target audience--lamers who don't know better--wouldn't be there anymore.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Posting to a public forum does not put your work into the public domain.
When Metallica's songs are played in a public forum (radio, stadiums), they don't become public domain.
Whats the big deal here? What do you think you're doing when you post to /.?
other free UseNet options are avaiable at http://newssearch.pilum.net . Just do a keyword search for groups you are interested in and you'll get a list of freely accessible servers that carry that group sorted by a number of useful criteria(message count, speed, posting ability, etc) .
How about: "Cool but slightly evil?"
Since most USENET posts still aren't posted through Google, it seems like that's not much of a cover.
In fact, the NYT will often explicitly verify for E-mail feedback whether it is OK to publish them.
Ah ok, I had missed that part.
Still, this is not nearly as problematic as them actually *owning* your posts would've been. If Google had claimed ownership, that brings up a host of bad situations, such as you having to obtain Google's permission if you wanted to release a book containing your posts (which would now be posts owned by Google).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I suspect the radio and television networks would disagree with you here...
Only the private broadcasters. Giving up copyright has nothing to do with the medium being a boradcast one. I never said that. It all comes down to the charter of the forum you are posting in.
The newsgroups were CREATED AS PUBLIC FORUMS. Accepting this is a precondition of participating.
Fox was created as a PRIVATE BROADCASTER.
When the newspaper editorial section states that "all your submission are belong to us" and you write something to them, you have no copyright protection because you knew you were waiving them before you sent them in. Ditto your words on RADIO AND TV call-in programs.
Ditto USENET.
It's the same thing.
The only issue I see is that Google can modify your posts, which most free sites do anyway (adding advertizing blurbs, etc).
If Google wasn't allowed to publish (etc) your posts, they couldn't propagate your posts. In fact, Google does most of those things to posts made through other news servers, too, since they reformat them in HTML and serve them to Google users.
"We have seen the effects of this already. Frequent posters who relied on deja.com were suddenly silenced."
And thank god for that! The signal-to-noise ratio on usenet *immediately* skyrocketed.
There would be nothing better than to get rid of web interfaces to Usenet. It allows dumb people to get access. There was a time, oh so very long ago, when Usenet was a high-quality information exchange media: there were interesting, informative discussions where most everyone knew what s/he was talking about. These days, it's about as intelligent as a Lowtax ICQ prank...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I think that because I perceive someone as being dumb, it's a *PERFECT* reason to kick them off the Net, the Web, *AND* Usenet.
Yes, that's elitist. Tough.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
That was a really good list; I was on it, and as I remember he worked really hard on it and deserved the rights he's upset about not having.
Read his message more carefully, and you'll understand exactly why he should have added similar terms of service.
Today's world may be way too obsessive about terms of service and the like, and there are about a billion clauses that are most likely too extreme to pass through a court. Sadly, that doesn't mean at least basic terms are not necessary. There are, after all, about a billion lawyers out there, and settling a dispute is extraordinarily expensive.
D
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But Stephen King would not post his latest bestseller on USENET, and neither would you. Anything you're willing to share using USENET is a free contribution you are not expecting to be paid for.
If that's not so, then the whole world tilts on its axis and USENET archives cannot exist anymore. Surely this is a bad thing?
D
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It's usenet! Any concept of 'intellectual property' is fairly flimsy.. if you post something to a global, uncontrolled, multi-jurisdiction, uncentralized anarchaic discussion forum like usenet, how can you possibly be so silly as to think you can demand what people do and don't do with you work? Sheesh. Gimme a break.
Next thing you know, people will want money for my repeating the jokes they tell at parties...
It seems to me that Slashdot has been consistently posting stories that misrepresent the facts in the case in order to attract postings to it's site.
This story - Google now owns your post - in actuality no such thing - Google actually is only taking a license to use your post, and the recent story on the TIVO patents both grossly distort the true situation.
The major misrepresentations seems to consistently involve intellectual property issues, which we know that editors have a strong bias against.
It is time for the Slashdot editorial staff to wake up and present their readership with a more factual repesentation of these issues. They are not serving their readership or their cause with these stories.
They just have a licence to use it. Big deal!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Whenever someone asks Google to see a message, Google must redistribute the message . In order to do this legally, they must have license to redistribute it, copy it, etc. The easiest way to do this is to put it in their TOS that this license is implicitly granted. It absolutely boggles me how people expect others to honour their copyright on original works one day, then turn around and demand that they break copyright later.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
"royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license."
It was not so long ago that we were ridiculing authors of postings for asserting their copyright in public postings; and ridiculing participants in disputes for suing one another for defamation. First amendment uber alles, we said.
All Google seems to be demanding here is the utterly reasonable proposition that, if you use their systems, you can't sue them for using the fruits of that use. True, you can't post there and then keep them from incorporating your posts in a book. Your solution? Don't post there.
Why is that unreasonable?
Seriously, it seems like we are taking highly inconsistent positions these days, depending more upon whose ok is gored than upon the merits or principles at hand.
Bull.
I regularly read comp.graphics.rendering.renderman, and while there are people posting "I am wondering how I can make toy story graphics with renderman?", there are still interesting discussion about antialiasing, algorithmic considerations and various RIB exporters.
And Larry Gritz posts regularly. That's good enough for me.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...doesn't Google *need* to do this, so that when we scream that our record of internet history needs to be preserved, that Google actually has the *right* to sell/give away/transfer/maintain/whatever the whole collection? If Google didn't have the rights to the collection, we'd all be digging in our hard drives to reconstitute it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Mail-to-News gateway. St00pidly-adminned Sendmail 8.6 box (just read your spam to find 'em!) or a cypherpunk chain of anonymous remailers. Library or university.
Well, under DMCA, if RIAA mails you (if you're a US ISP) and tells you that Message-ID: $FOO1 .. FOO45 represent parts 1-45 of a copyright violation, you still have to delete it or issue (forged) cancels.
Of course, no other USENET server has to accept the cancels. And it's likely that by the time you received the DMCA complaint, the articles will have expired anyways :)
More interestingly - absmp3.beatles isn't carried at my ISP. Rationale - the Beatles don't want their work posted on USENET. This newsgroup charter implies that the content of the group would exclusively consist of copyright violations. So my ISP (wisely, IMHO) chooses not to carry the group. But absmp3 has no such charter. Could be indie groups posting their own work. Could be the Grateful Dead, who don't mind sharing. Could also be a lot of copyrighted stuff too. But because absmp3 is "all of the above", my ISP chooses to carry it, because it's not clear that every post is intended to be a copyright violation. (It's just a lucky coincidence ;-)
Anyways, RIAA hasn't left USENET alone. They're no doubt logging NNTP-Posting-Host: headers and keeping track of who the largest posters are, and sending mails to various ISPs asking them to either nuke the poster or fork over the info for a lawsuit. Nuking the poster for TOS violation is probably cheaper (one mail to abuse@), and has much less negative PR impact (than a lawsuit), so that's probably the way they're going.
Thankfully, just as reading USENET is like drinking from a fire hose, so's suing MP3 posters off of USENET. At least for the time being. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has with the increase in the size of a full feed. What the hell, at least I can say I was there during the Golden Age, survived Endless September, and still managed to get enough out-of-print music out of it during the "My God, It's Still Alive!" stage to last me a lifetime.
(Actually, that may be the other reason RIAA has left USENET alone - RIAA makes most of its CD sales revenue off the latest teenybopper band single, not the back-catalogue. Napster's loaded with top-40. USENET's the exact opposite - the top 40's there, but the balance has shifted to favor the rare/obscure/OOP stuff. Much more interesting mix of stuff, IMHO.
Didn't slashdot touch off on this a few months back http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/22/0124253.sht
So I see this solely as something of a warning to companies who may think of making money of some sort in the future nothing more. Aside from worthless jokes, cheesy porn, and millions of 31337 hax0r3r posts 98% of which make no sense, I've found Usenet useless 95% of the times, and have found better private mailing lists for my needs, so I see no big deal with this news.
Murder, Genocide, MKUltra, and stolen Uranium
Want Root?
If you post to usenet, and think your messages aren't being submitted to the public domain, you are crazy. You can probably copyright your post, so others cannot claim it was their own or reword it in anyway, but good luck enforcing it. You certainly cannot prevent anyone from using your post pretty much at will.
Anyway, if you have the arrogance to think your post is important enough to be valuable and you can't find your own news server to post to (including the other free servers like newsone.net) you probably shouldn't be posting to usenet anyway....
-Moondogy
Relevant post
If you use their service to post to Usenet, you ARE agreeing to their contract, and are obligated to follow it.
I suspect that this clause of their contract is the exchange of "property" required for any contract to be considered legally binding. You receive their service in exchange for licensing them your posts. This would validate other parts of the contract, as well, in the eyes of the law.
You can get there via SafeWeb.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!!
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
This is the problem:
Suppose I am Stephen King. Suppose I'm writing my next bestseller, and I decide to post it, part by part, on the usenet. Using google.
What this means is that google can now take my story, and resell it, denying me my rightful royalties. As a result, my family and I now starve to death.
All your hellmouth post are belong to JonKatz .
But, do you have to read that disclaimer before it will let you get anywhere near the USENET services? Nope.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
When it was still DejaNews, they blocked access from Anonymizer addresses. Don't know about other anonymizing services, though.
If you don't pay to use their service, you're not a customer.- -----------
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It's quite possible that you could use the DMCA against Google, if you posted to USENET by means other than Google, and Google then appended advertising to your posting. Sending a DMCA "notice and takedown" order to Google's backbone provider might be interesting.
Work does not go into the public domain unless (1) the content wasn't copyrightable in the first place, (2) the copyright runs out
Do copyrights even run out anymore? I thought Congress and Disney Co. had a deal: every 20 years, Congress retroactively adds 20 years to all copyrights.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A while ago people were all concerned that the "valuable usenet archive" hosted by deja had dissapeared. Now people are concerned about their usenet posts being owned by the company who brought the deja archive back...you can't have it both ways. If you want an archive of usenet, let google do what you want with the posts. After all, it's not exclusive rights.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
What a troll! As has already been pointed out by numerous others, Google is claiming a non-exclusive license to your usenet posts. It doesn't own them. I'd only add that it's irritating in the extreme (a) to see this coming from /., which of all organizations should know a lot more about Licensing than this stupid story indicates; and (b) to see this crap slung at Google, the company which freely provides the best search engine on the web, and which is no doubt the first choice of basically everyone reading this story. Time for me to go back to K5.
sheesh...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
http://webreference.com/roadmap/map08.html
That should answer your question.
TTYL + HAND!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Do these volumes include binaries? Working for an ISP that handles 90gig of new volume a day, I'm more than a little surprised.... The biggest attraction for usenet now are the binaries posts it seems, 90Gig isn't just students posting Linux support questions. Also, as we're on news server issues, why has the RIAA etal left news alone? I guess because it's de-centralized?
Seriously where do the news service providors stand legally, they own the servers and people download copied software / music off those servers. I realise the articles don't orginate from a single news providor and I guess news providor's are counted legally the same way as telephone companies, but if 2600 can be found guilty of something for just linking how long before this changes. I recall a case in the UK where a news providor was found guily of libel for just carring an article, how much safe ground does usenet have against the MPAA & the RIAA?
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
By posting communications on or through the Service, you automatically grant Google a:
Royalty-free = You're posting it on usenet, if you wanted royalities in the first place this isn't such a good idea.
Perpetual = Its on going, they don't have to renew this "license".
irrevocable = You can't take this license away from google, of course there going to put this in there.
non-exclusive = You can license what you post to third parties regardless of google's license.
reproduce = As soon google's news server distributes it to it's news peers, it's reproduced.
modify = One of the same freedoms the GPL grants.
publish = In essence when someone does a search on google and your post is returned, they are publishing it and again if you didn't want people to see it why post it?
edit = Correct your spelling.
translate = Provide an additional service so the article you posted can be seen and possible help more people.
distribute = Send to other news peers.
perform = If you post guitar tab / a play for people to perform, why can't google do the same?
All of the above are things would would expect to happen if you posted information to usenet, I think Google are just ass covering a bit here. Maybe it's to stop newbies complaining that don't understand usenet. For people that post to news and understand it, you generally know what you post is for the world to do with as they please.
Furthermore, you still retain the copyright to whatever you post, so they don't "own" it, you've just given them a license to use it as they please. The only problem I could see is that Google could license your post to third parties without your consent but really if you had get rich plans by licensing something would you really post it for the world to see for free? Is this such a small price to pay for a good free service and guess what, if you don't like the license, don't use the service.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Each post made outside of Google should have a signature file specifically prohibiting use by Google, specifying costs to be assessed for licensing by google, etc. (say $500 per incident) and in general prohibiting any "license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the communication alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed", and prohibiting any effort to "sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees" without prior agreement of the original poster or their heirs.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why would Google make this request? I would guess to defend themselves legally - too pull a CYA in a sense. But it doesnt make sense. Surely I can post to news servers WITHOUT using Deja. If I post to news.someisp.com it is available to DejaGoogle users - WITHOUT the AYBABTU-License... so, here Google has the AYBABTUGoogle posts mingled w/ the 'other' posts.
Now, Ive never used Deja - so it may be more than a interface to the NNTP network that I am accustomed to using w/ PAN and whatnot*.
How does Google possibly need to make this AYB-Style Land Grab when it wont do them any good because the rest of us can go on posting our aol-suckzors libel-insipiring posts from elsewhere && google serves them up to their users JUST AS IF THEY HAD BEEN POSTED via DejaGoogle....
This dosnt make sense*. Google dosnt appear to gain much by doing this - except a shitload of pissed off users wondering how the heck they get off making demands of the users who are supposed to be 'customers.'
*Is Deja not simply a NNTP client?
It's not a contract unless I sign it and/or otherwise agree to it.
--
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
IMO, i believe Google is doing this to prevent somebody from suing them for distributing someone else's information, and making it available in a format it was not originally intended. By posting information on Usenet through, you're relinquishing your claim to that information.
Just playing it safe when anybody will suee anybody for any reason whatsoever....
Google is protecting their backside. If they don't ask for a non-exclusive right when you post through this service, there is a potential for a lawsuit later if they create archives or do other things with that material. If I were in their shoes, I'd ask for a non-exclusive license, too, in order to continue be able to post.
Slashdot has at least an implicit (if not explicit) non-exclusive right to your words when you post here.
When I ran an early Internet marketing mailing list from 1994 to 1996 (www.i-m.com), I foolishly didn't initially make a condition of posting, and this, in turn, led users later to threaten me with lawsuits if I produced any for-profit or for-free versions of the list outside the archive. I eventually shut down the list, as I had better things to do than hire lawyers and sort out copyright issues.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Just curious, and too lazy to dig through whatever terms of service I didn't read when getting an account... but does Slashdot 'own' my postings here in this manner?
I read the license grant and all it translates to is "If you are as anal retentive as the Church of Scientology and decide that your self incriminating usenet post should no longer be found in our archive or published in our future "best of usenet" miniseries, we will have a leg to stand on.
The key term to look for in there is "none exclusive".
That term essentially means you still own your post and you can sell or give it to anyone else as you see fit. It also says that if someone else builds a competitive service we can't challenge them on the notion that your posts belong to us because the license grant is NONE EXCLUSIVE.
In short Google is not behaving badly and have simply written up the bare minimum document needed to save their asses.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Currently, it is rather difficult to post something anonymously to a newsgroup. Especially if your only newsgroup access is via your ISP.
So, by using anonymizer.com or something similar to log into google groups and then using google to post to a newsgroup, you have a much better chance of remaining anonymous.
I've noticed the same thing, both on /. and in newsgroups I've been reading over the years. The problem is there's only a finite number of things to say about Topic X, and once the flamewar has been had and everyone knows what the positions are, it's pretty much over and the interesting people drift off. You have to have a dedicated group of flamebots to keep the same argument rolling (see abortion arguments or OS advocacy groups).
/. does it), or a willingness to go waaaay off-topic in interesting ways (see alt.folklore.computers for example).
To keep things going, you either need a steady supply of news (which is how
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Folks, what they are saying is not that they own your data. You are still free to do what you will with said data....
They are (it looks like) simply covering their ass, so if they one day build a new database they don't get SUED by some yahoo who says 'you don't have the right to do that'.
They are saying that if you post through them, then they can do what they want with the posting, basically. Yes, it cuold have some negative ramifications.. but then, I doubt peopel would be posting sensitive IP to usenet anyway.
Regardless of 'posters rights' I think it's silly to post something to a public, global, uncontrolled and uncentralized forum like usenet and expect to have any sort of control, legal or otherwise, over what happens to the data you posted.
The 'cluedness' of the average USENET poster has gone down the tubes. Sure, it's always been a great place for newbies to get some help from the veterans, but lately things have gotten out of control. Cross-posting is rampant, trolls are everywhere, and spammers think folks care about their offerings.
Then get a better newsreader. I see hardly any spam, annoying posters never hit my radar, and posts from people whose expertise I value reading are moved up the lists so I read the threads they have posted to first. You need a scoring newsreader rather than a kill-filing one for really good post sorting - Gnus is my preference.
Technical discussion has given away to politics.
Blind assertion does not equal fact. Various newsgroups see their readership change over time. In almost any group, you can start to answer all the newbie questions after six months, simply by being exposed to all the responses. Politics does occur on the newsgroups, but so does technical discussion. If a group no longer serves your needs, find a better/different one.
Less than 18 months ago comp.sys.sgi.* was full of interesting chatter, these days half of the posts are by folks asking how to install a (completely unaccelerated and very unfinished) Linux port on an SGI MIPS machine they bought off eBay for $50.
So? You obviously don't value these posts, which is probably fair enough. For a new (or nearly new...) SGI owner, asking about difficulties with a Linux port is a reasonable question. If the answer is "Read the FAQ", then educate the new users. Thats a part of the UseNet community.
The true engineers, developers, and scientific users have pulled completely out and rely on private mailing lists.
Hmm. Staring at the poster lists, I'd say your claim was pretty far from reality. There seems to be a reasonable clue-to-noise ratio rattling around the sgi groups.
Some people will give up on Usenet, often because local resources to them give more select information. I've knocked around on Usenet for about the last 8 years or so, and I don't really see any great signs of changes in clue-level on the newsgroup levels. (except on alt.fan.pratchett, which went from a fun place to hang out to a disaster area simply because of a massive increase in posting levels making it difficult to keep up with or maintain any solid contact with. The price of success..) There are more people now who are playing with Linux and making their first steps with an unfamiliar OS than I remember being the case four years ago, but that is hardly surprising. Don't get frustrated at new users for asking questions you already know the answers to - either help them or offer new sections to be added to the newsgroup FAQ. New users have always been a part of the UseNet postings - getting them clued up is part of the UseNet tradition.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
What they're getting fo now, is clear authority to append their selfpromotion, and any outside advertising payload, to your post.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Yeah, that only happens on little pissant sites like Slashdot. *cough*JonKatz*cough*
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
However, then they continue to say you can't reproduce or distribute the "Materials" for public purpose without the written permission of Google.
This means you can't reply to a post if you include anything from the post you are replying to.
I wonder if it also applies if you are not replying to a Google post through Google, but with your own news-agent...
I would have included the relevant part from the posting terms page, but I am afraid to, because I havent't got their written permission.
Since GOOGLE GROUPS is an anagram of LOG RUSE: GO GOP! It's obvious this whole thing is a republican plot. GOOGLE GROUPS is also an anagram for GO SPLURGE GOO. obviously something to do with Usenet porn.
As you noted in the write-up yourself, this agreement merely forces you to grant Google a non-exclusive license to use your post (in exchange for them allowing you to posting it via their service free of charge). This explicitly means that Google does not claim to own your UseNet posts; you still retain ownership and full rights to do whatever you want with it. They can just also use it without your permission (but as they don't own it, they can't do things like force you to pay them to use your own post, or sell your post to someone else, and so on).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sorry guys, it was just way too tempting.
I thought Google were the good guys, because they used a Linux server farm. Now it turns out that they're acting like a business, which makes them the bad guys, right? Can one of the mages at Slashdot please tell me what the orthodox line is on Google? Still clean? Or worse than Microsoft?
And are there any incensed iconoclasts out there pledging to create an Open Source, GPL'd search engine and news directory?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Just because I grant Google a license to my post, doesn't mean they own the post, just like the fact that I have a license for Microsoft Office 200 doesn't mean that I "own" Microsoft Office 2000.
That google demands a license in order to post using their service may be unfortunate, but it isn't really suprising given the state of Intellectual Property law in the world today. Without the license, they would be subject to unreasonable liability.
And yes, what about posts made elsewhere that end up on Google groups. I really have no idea. Maybe Google will claim that they assumed the post was redistributatble given the nature of usenet an assumption they couldn't necessarily reasoably make for a posting made through their own service.
I'm not one to usually get excited about spam.. usually quite the opposite, however I received one advertising eTin.com a, free & totally anonymous, Usenet service. They have a decent interface, and very fast server(s).
They don't retain binaries for much more than 3-4 days, but they keep everything else indefinately.
Like all good things, I'm sure they'll start charging after they get you hooked.. but it's a much better alternative to Google in the interm.
Cheers.
GB.
Usenet did fine before deja.com, it'll do fine after google.com is gone.
Somehow, I don't think it's a problem that some ISPs don't allow newsgroup access.
As long as you can find people like Dennis Ritchie,John R. Mashey(actually, he seems to have abandoned Usenet in January, but his Farewell is there...),John McCarthy,Bjarne Stroustroup and Larry Wall posting frequently, I'll keep reading.
Somehow, it doesn't bother me much that what passes for common wisdom here is that Usenet is effectively already dead. I don't read much about sporks or petrified women on Usenet.
The problem comes in only if the prediction I made comes true: that Google Groups grows to become the primary way for people to post to UseNet due to continuing decay of ISP support for UseNet. UseNet is supposed to be distributed, not centralized in a corporation. We have seen the effects of this already. Frequent posters who relied on deja.com were suddenly silenced.
And now that Google can take posted articles out of context and publish them without attribution -- and if Google becomes the dominant UseNet entryway in the same way Windows is the dominant OS -- then it puts a chill, or at least a corporatized spin, on UseNet.
So, yes, there are alternatives to Google Groups today, but tomorrow UseNet may be nearly fully controlled by and dependent upon a single company.
The 'cluedness' of the average USENET poster has gone down the tubes. Sure, it's always been a great place for newbies to get some help from the veterans, but lately things have gotten out of control. Cross-posting is rampant, trolls are everywhere, and spammers think folks care about their offerings. Technical discussion has given away to politics. Less than 18 months ago comp.sys.sgi.* was full of interesting chatter, these days half of the posts are by folks asking how to install a (completely unaccelerated and very unfinished) Linux port on an SGI MIPS machine they bought off eBay for $50. The true engineers, developers, and scientific users have pulled completely out and rely on private mailing lists.
Google didn't kill USENET, lamers did.
...And welcome to real life.
Welcome to the way the law actually works....from potential lawsuits. Any one of the millions of posters on Usenet could potentially sue them for including their posts in their archives. Including that clause just make it less likely that something like that will happen.
Usenet posts are a fairly grey area when it comes to copyright law... Google's just being safe. Now, they could be planning to take all the Star Trek porn fanfic that's being posted through their interface and make millions selling it in their own compilation, but I think that's unlikely...
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
And now that Google can take posted articles out of context and publish them without attribution -- and if Google becomes the dominant UseNet entryway in the same way Windows is the dominant OS -- then it puts a chill, or at least a corporatized spin, on UseNet.
Where does it say it can publish them without attribution? The copyright doesn't change hands, and even under license, the copyright holder must be credited.
The clause in question only means that Google has automatic permission to re-use the post without having to ask the copyright holder, not claim ownership of it.
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
"In exchange for using this service, Google can re-use your post."
From the clause, I can see no change of copyright or any other IP, but Google is granted non-exclusive rights to the post. (Non-exclusive meaning the copyright holder can still do whatever he likes with it, even sell it on).
What exactly is the problem here?
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
You know, like George Lucas or Sony. So we should all continue supporting them individually while loudly proclaiming collectively that nobody should support them.
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