Dr. Albert --
Thanks for your mail. I'll take a shot at these issues, starting with the issue of privacy. As I am not a lawyer, none are to be construed as legal opinions. But there isn't much law (or at least precedent) on many of these issues anyway -- as far as I can tell, opinion is all we have at least as far as copyrights applying to UseNet go.
I am curious as to the privacy issues that have come up or may come up with respect to the DejaNews archive, as well as to the legal ramifications of making public archives available in this manner.I have received some mail on the privacy issue, and frankly, when it first came up, we were surprised that anybody believed that something like DejaNews could be a violation of their privacy while UseNet itself was not so viewed.
UseNet has always been the "wild west" of the Internet and has functioned on a social level by the force of custom, not law or regulation. You can post whatever you want wherever you want, and are only limited by your own sense of propriety and the discouraging influence of other UseNet readers who may not believe that what you've said is appropriate or presented in the appropriate venue.
There does, however, exist documentation on UseNet written by experienced UseNet authors, which provide a common-sensical approach to UseNetiquette. All of such documentation I've read on UseNet indicates its very public nature. To quote the "Hints on Writing Style For UseNet" document, available at the UseNet Info Center at the University of North Carolina:
Remember - your current or future employers may be reading your articles. So might your spouse, neighbors, children, and others who will long-remember your gaffes.The privacy issue surprised us because we thought this fact was fairly obvious. But apparently it is not. Many users believe that posting to a particular newsgroup means that they are addressing a limited, definable audience: this is just not so. When you post to UseNet, you have absolutely no control over who reads, archives, or quotes what you say. The 'audience' of your posts is theoretically and actually anyone in the world who has newsserver access. Some have estimated this body of users as numbering some 30 million people. UseNet is divided into newsgroups not to limit access to select groups of newsgroup members, but merely to divide discussion into manageable, ostensibly focussed discourse.
Indeed, some newsbrowser programs will, before they allow you to post an article to UseNet, display a message along the lines of "you are about to post a message viewable by 1000s of users worldwide: do you wish to continue?" What misleads many users is the 'privacy by obscurity' viewpoint, i.e. the belief that posting to an 'out-of-the-way' newsgroup and usually not having to deal with the consequences of what they say constitutes a guarantee of privacy. It does not and should not: privacy by obscurity is an illusion and is no privacy at all.
We believe that UseNet was never intended as any kind of a private communications venue -- private email, non-gatewayed mailing lists, and posting from anonymous remailers or accounts are several more anonymous methods of communicating with people on the Internet. I think one of the problems is that users are misled by how trivial it is to post to UseNet: they don't realize that the consequences of making data linked to your identity available to millions of readers worldwide virtually instantaneously is quite non-trivial and not at all similar to the effort put forth to accomplish it. It may only take a few keystrokes and mouseclicks to post data to UseNet but, the existence of DejaNews notwithstanding, the act of posting can have repercussions just like any more difficult public-speaking or publishing endeavor can.
What we do is to observe and record public communication. And the prudence people apply to public communication in the physical world should apply to the electronic one as well: if you don't want people to hear what you have to say (and presumably, link it to your actual identity), don't say it in the "crowded room" of UseNet. If I run naked down a (supposedly) deserted street in Manhattan, and then later hear my neighbors tittering about what I did, I might be surprised that they found out, but I shouldn't be outraged that they did find out or that they talked about it. Reporting on what people say or do in a public venue is, in our opinion, neither illegal nor unethical: the existence of the fourth estate is based on it, and our society would be nowhere near as open as it is if this were disallowed by law or custom.
I try to tell users who feel wronged by DejaNews because an unintended audience managed to read their posts via our search engine that our service is, like UseNet, merely an information tool and has no ethical color whatsoever since it is based on public information. People who judge you based on the groups to which you post, or on what you say are either behaving fairly or unfairly: we believe that the responsibility for their judgement and its consequences lies with them, not with the medium from which they drew their conclusions.
As such, the arguments against DejaNews based on the privacy/anonymity argument always seem to me to be "shooting the messenger", the messenger being DejaNews and the message being that posting to UseNet is electronic publishing with wide, unknown and unknowable distribution. We're not happy that it took the advent of something like DejaNews to deliver this message, but we are happy if more people are now more fully aware of what it is that they're doing when they post to UseNet.
Do you have any provisions for excluding copyrighted material from the archives when the author does not grant permission to reproduce (and if so, how do you determine which articles are reproducible and which are not?)Actually, it seems to be fairly well established that all articles posted to UseNet (which is all we archive) are protected by copyright whether or not copyright is explicitly noted on the posting. Contrary to popular opinion, most informed sources agree that articles posted to UseNet are not in the public domain in the copyright sense of the phrase.
But since the way UseNet operates is for posted articles to be propagated from newshost to newshost so that they can be read from any site around the world with a newsfeed (there are exceptions -- not all newsservers carry all the groups), this copyright seems to be a mere formality when dealing with distribution of copyrighted material via UseNet. I've read opinions by Net experts stating that copyrights on UseNet articles don't apply to "the sort of copying one expects when one posts to UseNet." If it did, we'd have no UseNet: the assumption is that posting to UseNet grants implicit permission to copy posts from newsserver to newsserver -- it's the only way UseNet functions.
Given that, the question then becomes "is DejaNews a newsserver?" We believe that we are by all available definitions of what UseNet and UseNet newsservers are. The only difference between our service and a standard newsfeed is that we archive articles longer and we provide a search engine to search through older posts.
"Normal" UseNet newfeeds expire (i.e. 'delete') newsposts after a certain period of time, often about 2 weeks. But this expiration is neither consistent among newsgroups or newsservers, and is largely intended for purposes of computational conservation, i.e. saving diskspace by dumping old UseNet to archived magnetic tape. Expiration, and the specifics of it, have always been a matter of UseNet custom and is implemented differently by each UseNet news administrator.
We keep the news online longer because we have the resources and desire to do so, and I have never seen any regulation forbidding it. Indeed, UUNet itself (an originator of the UseNet news protocols from 1979) keeps archives of many groups online on it's ftp server -- they publicly distribute old UseNet just as we do. This is to say nothing of the thousands of users who have archived UseNet groups for their own purposes, and who do with these archives what they will.
As for the search engine, the establishment of indexing and searching techniques for large databases of publicly available information has long been established as acceptable. Library card catalogs and microfiche have been available for years -- we are merely the UseNet application of these strategies for managing large volumes of data. We do not believe that the presence of a search engine on our newsserver affects the 'area of distribution' of UseNet -- if it is legal for a newsserver to present UseNet as electronically published information, then it is our right, by the precedent of print media, to provide search tools for said information.
Occasionally I'll get the argument "I did not intend my articles to be used by a for-profit company such as DejaNews." This seems easily disposed of when one realizes that most Internet Service Providers (AOL, Compuserve, and a host of smaller mom-and-pop ISPs) offer a UseNet newsfeed as a feature for their Internet connectivity packages, for which they charge users and from which they make a profit.
We subsist from advertising revenues -- our users will see graphical banners and text from our sponsors, but they don't have to pay anything to actually read copyrighted UseNet. Conseuqently, we make a much more indirect profit from UseNet than these ISPs do.
Seemingly, if making a profit from displaying copyrighted UseNet postings is illegal, then all for-profit ISPs that offer a UseNet newsfeed are also illegal. Again, I don't believe that it was ever explicitly intended for UseNet to remain noncommercial. One may argue from an aesthetic viewpoint that it's regrettable for the Internet to become commercialized, but the truth is that Web search engines such as ourselves, Lycos, Webcrawler, etc., would not be able to function without advertising revenue.
Judging only from the hundreds of amazingly appreciative, grateful users I've corresponded with, the service we provide is very valuable and benefits UseNet by making it more effective at being what it was always intended to be -- an information exchange tool to bring disparate, physically separated people closer together in a common forum for the purpose of sharing ideas and opinions.
If an author asks, after the fact, to have his articles removed from the system, do you have the capability of doing so? Is it possible to prevent all articles from a given author from appearing in the system a-priori, or must deletions all be made after the fact?Such deletions and exclusions are technically possible, and we will occasionally do it as a courtesy, but only as a courtesy. What would be much better would be for users concerned about these issues to not post to UseNet. The kind of public dissemination of information that UseNet stands for is antithetical to both rigid copyright and intellectual property concepts, and to those concerned about the privacy of their posts. There might actually be a case against people upset about copyright infringement, the theory being that introducing material not intended to be copied via "the sort of copying one expects when one posts to UseNet" into a newsfeed is itself a violation of computer trespassing laws.
And finally, were any of these issues considered before starting the service, and have any of them come up since it was opened?Yes and yes: I occasionally receive mail from users irate over this issue. But for the reasons outlined above, we feel fairly certain that our position is not legally distinguishable from those of other UseNet newsservers. As such, we believe that if what we do is illegal, all of UseNet must also be.
As cyberlaw is such a nascent field, anything is possible. Witness the Communications Decency Act, a blatant infringement of First Amendment rights propagated, in my opinion, because our lawmakers do not yet have a firm conceptual grasp of the technology they are legislating: an application of the CDA to print media or verbal expression would be inconceivable to us and, I hope, roundly shouted down. But given the CDA, much of UseNet and the Internet as a whole could be outlawed tomorrow: from a business and a personal standpoint, I hope this does not happen.
We, and millions of other users agree, that UseNet is a very valuable net resource -- we want it to continue functioning and we also want to continue enhancing its functionality by doing what we do.
Please let me know if I can help further.
Regards,
George D. Nickas
User Liaison
DEJA NEWS
demos@dejanews.com