Re: Reducing Usenet Bandwidth

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Mon, 04 Feb 2002 11:47:24 +1300, Simon Lyall <simon.lyall () ihug co nz>  said:

> I am really surprised that the RIAA and similar groups havn't "gone after"
> usenet to any great degree yet. I can't really see how binaries newsgroups
> different in any great extent (from the copyright angle) from your random
> p2p network.
>
> Once a few lawsuits are issued (does the ISC count as a distributor?)
> against the dozen or so top news providers things could be quite
> interesting.

At least in the US, the RIAA couldn't bring much of a suit against the ISP,
for the same reason they don't usually bring suits against the ISPs in the
p2p side of things.  17 USC 512 protects the ISP from behavior on the part
of their users *if* the ISP is cooperative in dealing with the problem
when notified of infringing material.

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/512.html

We see a fair number of form-letter complaints from the RIAA regarding
p2p and other file-sharing by our users.  Every once in a great while
we see a complaint about netnews and our standard reply is usually
"Hmm.. it was in an alt.* newsgroup?  It's been over 48 hours? It's
been over-written already..."

-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech

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