Comments on: Comments on 3759

Post number 3759

tranquileye — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 09:47:48 -0800

Deja.com is putting its archive of Usenet news, covering a period from 1995 to the present, up for sale. As you might have noticed, for some months now Deja's archive of older (pre-1999) news has been unavailable. They had claimed the situation was temporary, but now it appears to be permanent. This leaves me with something of a sick feeling. While much of late-1990s Usenet is junk, it has both practical and historical significance. The notion that archiving Usenet is not commercially viable does not bode well for saving other parts of the Internet's history.

By: s10pen

s10pen — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 09:54:56 -0800

it seems that salvaging and maintaining the usenet would be a nice project for some of the web's non-profit groups (the ones dedicated to standards, etc) it seems like the internet is kind of going back in time, as the things people actually use are still the simple ones that deliver information efficiently. I'm not well schooled in the usenet's history, but how did Deja.com come to "own" the postings, anyway? I don't remember seeing them associated with the system until 1997 or so.

By: tomalak

tomalak — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 10:23:05 -0800

DejaNews was started in early 1995 and was primarily dedicated on Usenet search. I'm not sure if Deja "owns" the articles (if Google archives a MetaFilter page can they go sell their cache of archived pages?). The notion of creating a goofy e-commerce site out of a Usenet search site might not be comemrcially viable.

By: cCranium

cCranium — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 10:54:51 -0800

Deja owns their database of Usenet news, not the actual postings themselves.

By: rschram

rschram — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 10:59:00 -0800

I think Deja "owns" Usenet posts insofar as no one else has yet to step forward to claim ownership of them. It's like scrap metal.

By: baylink

baylink — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 11:15:42 -0800

The closest thing to title in a written work is it's copyright. Each individual owner owns their copyright in their Usenet postings, unless explicitly renounced. Deja might assert a compilation copyright on the collection, but I don't think that's pertinent here. The physical disks are another story. And have they been *keeping up with it*?

By: daveadams

daveadams — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:00:32 -0800

I think the question isn't whether Deja "owns" the posts. Of course they don't. But who else has five years worth of Usenet stored on hard drives? Deja doesn't want to pay to make that available, but they're also not going to just give away all the data they spent a lot of money collecting.

By: beth

beth — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:05:56 -0800

OH pleasepleaseplease, let Google buy it! I think that's the only decent hope for a good buyer. -Beth

By: CrazyUncleJoe

CrazyUncleJoe — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:17:09 -0800

Am I the only one who wouldn't mind seeing some of his old Usenet posts dissapear into the aether? Really? eep.

By: Markb

Markb — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:43:38 -0800

Nope CUJ, but fortunately some of us have had more than one 'net incarnation since 1995 ;-) - phew!

By: Georgina

Georgina — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 16:13:12 -0800

Does anybody know how much they want for the Usetnet archives? Are we talking millions? Or do you have to buy the whole company? (The article seemed a bit unclear to me.) I'd definitely contribute to a group to buy the postings and house them somewhere.

By: shinybeast

shinybeast — Thu, 19 Oct 2000 19:58:45 -0800

Make yourself heard. There's an online petition which covers this subject. Go here to sign it.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Fri, 20 Oct 2000 08:25:28 -0800

Good freaking Lord, USENET is a distributed article system. By posting on USENET you agree to distribution everywhere from news servers to e-mail LISTSERVs to web gateways to tape archives. And while there's clearly no need to save alt.binaries.pictures.homunculi.autofellatio, perhaps a bit of comp.* might prove useful.