From Newsgroup: alt.usenet.offline-reader

When Usenet started, posts were propagated by peers that had to store, and forward, them as part of the way Usenet works. Anyone posting to Usenet understood this, and by posting, implicitly gave their permission for this to happen. Usenet was mostly used in an academic environment where traditionally information is shared freely without being taken advantage of. Under these conditions, it wasn't necessary to explicitly give a licence to publish the post because of the shared assumptions about how the post would be made available. Anyone who had access to a Usenet server could freely read or reply to any posts on that server. So by posting people were helping others without having their work exploited for a third parties gain.

Usenet to Web portals have changed this; they make groups available to the public, but add adverts or hurdles like registration users have to jump to participate in them. The content of a Usenet server is available in full in an open API, allowing anyone with access, to archive or forward posts in their original form. But web archives only allow messages to be accessed a few at a time from their web interface, preventing them from being redistributed and effectively locking the user in - unless they (realise they) can get the content from another source.

This is going far beyond the implicit permission originally given by the poster; it is breaking the implicit contract between posters and Usenet administrators.

* What damage does this web archiving do?

It causes the direct inconvenience to users of adverts. Web archives often hide some details of the post (e.g. the email address, which prevents people responding directly). It makes it harder for users to respond to posts because they (think they) have to register with a web site to respond. This in turn reduces the responses a question gets. It misleads users into thinking a web site is Usenet, locking them in to that site - some sites also keep any responses only on their web site instead of propagated them to Usenet. These things in turn discourage people from posting because they believe their work will be exploited by others instead of benefiting all, poisoning the Usenet community.

* What can be done about it?

Under international copyright law, the creator of a work owns copyright to it and publishing it is only allowed with permission (a 'licence') from the creator. This is codified in, for example, the DMCA. Usenet-to-Web portals may be violating this copyright. This is a grey area because of the implicit nature of the licence. But posters can make this explicit.

* What to do next?

If you want your posts to be used in accordance with the original intent of Usenet you can add the following line to your headers: #v+ X-Licence: X-Licence (http://squte.com/x-licence.html) #v- The X-Licence header shows the licence that may be used to publish the post. The X-Licence itself is intended to capture the intent of freely sharing knowledge. It is a copy-left licence that conforms to the Open Source Definition and explicitly allows Usenet propagation and responsible web archiving. Of course, you may use a different licence, e.g.
"X-Licence: Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA)"

* Why not just use X-No-Archive?

The X-No-Archive header is not ideal for those who don't object to their posts being archived but want them to remain freely available.

* Disclaimer

I administer a Web-to-Usenet portal at http://squte.com/dyn/usenews/index.html. Squte.com does not contain any advertising or require registration and makes it clear that posts originate from Usenet. Squte.com tries to conform to the X-Licence conditions for all posts archived, even those without an x-licence header.

~tdk

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