Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Protection Against Abuse by Usenetters Summary: Anybody ever heard of the concept of "fairness?" Message-ID: Date: 13 Feb 89 19:22:34 GMT References: <2726@looking.UUCP> <7651@chinet.chi.il.us> <1989Feb10.210824.1579@sq.uucp> <7687@chinet.chi.il.us> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: OSU Lines: 198 In-reply-to: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us's message of 11 Feb 89 17:05:21 GMT patrick@chinet.chi.il.us writes: Now in the example cited, here comes Compuserve; willing to take all it No, it's not, and you should stop abusing the name of an organization which has never even appeared here of their own will. They are not an example of *anything* as regards the Usenet. can get for free and re-sell the cooperative efforts of others for $6 per hour. CompuServe has been misused as an example so many times that it's no longer funny. They have been abused in absentia without justification as some sort of evil presence Out There Someplace from which everyone is desperately trying to hide Our Good Work. Y'know, if I packaged up a whole mess of this discussion and foisted it off on a few interesting people I know across town, I imagine that there's a couple of Usenetters who just might get informative notes from people whose titles end in "attorney at law," which notes would make fascinating comments regarding defamation and slander and libel and whatever other legalese applies to this situation. But then, I don't know, since I don't/can't know what is going inside CServe at this moment, and hence it is entirely possible that I'm being just as abusive by suggesting such a thing. *That* is my point: You have no idea what goes on inside CompuServe. None whatever. I have some, having dealt with them fairly extensively for quite some time, knowing more than a couple of people who work[ed] inside it, and having had to deal at a non-trivial level with the political machinery which it embodies, up to and including the level of people with job titles like Chief Technical Officer. Be aware that CompuServe barely knows that Usenet exists. When CServe's UNIX Forum was created, it took not a small amount of discussion with the Powers That Be there to make them realize that an entity comprising more than a million people, a couple hundred thousand active participants, and thousands of computers could exist without a formalized power structure. They had to be mollified that there was no way that a "Usenet, Inc" could come after them in any way for any reason. There are individuals within CServe that know quite a lot about Usenet, but in my experience they create an almost empty intersection with the set which controls the sorts of services CServe provides. The thought of gatewaying Usenet with CServe "forums" was debated and thrown out for at least 3 reasons. Legal: CServe does indeed have a compilation copyright on the entire contents of CompuServe Information Service (deliberately not equivalent to CompuServe, Inc itself), and that compilation copyright could not be easily reconciled with the anarchy of the Usenet. Enter the new wrinkle of there being compilation copyrights claimed out here, and the matter becomes much more muddied indeed. Political: The lack of knowledge of Usenet within CompuServe makes it darn difficult to get the Powers That Be to deal with this non-entity, especially because it becomes essentially impossible to negotiate with a non-entity. Social: Like it or not, CServe forums are not a whole lot like Usenet newsgroups in a social sense, and gatewaying one into the other would create some AWFUL repercussions, based on the opinions of at least a dozen people with whom I talked about it. The similarity ends with a formal definition such as, "An electronic medium in which people post messages in a memo-like format." Anything about the respective formats more than that cannot be compared directly. Don't think that it would be possible simply to shout CServe users down for improper Usenetiquette as per Portal with perjoratives like, "...when you figure out REAL networks...," because CompuServe comprises more subscribers than Usenet does, and they'd shout back - louder and in greater numbers. There is something to be said about the importance of distributing information; yes, we do want our messages to be widely disseminated, and our information FREELY available to others. If you were to address a definition of `free' in order to make the question meaningful, especially as regards availability -vs- economics, you might be going somewhere. I consider that you have not. For myself, I post certain things out of a desire to make information available, without any thought whatever to the improvement of my economic condition. I do not care that, e.g., Portal's owners are very probably making a small (or large) fortune off this sort of thing, and that my contributions are helping in that occurrence. All this suggests an equally important point regarding your reference to whether "we...want our messages...disseminated," seeing as how the possibility of getting an agreement out of to is zero - just ponder the difficulty of getting a decision made about whether a new newsgroup should be created. I suggest that large commercial entities such as CompuServe will never gateway Usenet into their systems, not because they don't wish to have to ponder the possibility of pursuing legal action against little semantic nothings like you and me, but rather because they are more concerned that YOU will abuse THEM - just as you have already. How would YOU like to enter this environment at this point, if your name had been subjected to as much abuse as CompuServe's has up to now? We overlook/ignore modest user fees of the $10 per month Portal type or the $50 per year (frequently written off) Chinet type. Why? What is it about $10/month that constitutes a "modest" fee? What are you arguing, other than an issue of degree? Is it not possible that, given the set of services which CServe offers, $6/hr is really quite "modest" as well? If you are not aware (from other comments, I don't believe that you are - please correct me if I'm wrong), CServe offers a whole heck of a lot more than Usenettish newsgroups/forums. Although I personally do not find them useful, there is a huge variety of other services (stock exchange access, travel services, VAST software repositories, email with gateways to certain other systems including MCI, the list goes on - I am not trying to make a commercial but rather to stress a point) which CServe offers; these services make it quite a valuable resource to some 438,000 (last time I asked) subscribers. These people put up with CServe's charges without nary a sigh because of the value they perceive they have gained by it. They evidently consider those fees "modest." Whose version of "modest" is correct here? Yours? Why? But I do not think we can afford to overlook the commercial resale of our cooperative, goodwill efforts on Usenet. You already have. Can you say with any surety that your "cooperative, goodwill efforts" are not *already* being resold commercially somewhere? Tell me, Is CompuServe already on the Usenet? How sure are you of the answer you just gave? There's a 3B2/400 in my basement that takes a full newsfeed off of osu-cis, and it speaks with CompuServe for certain purposes every hour on the hour - how do you know that I am not already feeding CompuServe? (I speak now in an abstract sense, of course, to drive a point home. No, I do not feed CompuServe. But maybe someone else does - have you asked eric@snark.uu.net? And if he doesn't, does someone else besides?) Just how profitable is Portal? Do you know? I doubt its proprietors are the least interested in telling you just how profitable they are, but a couple of months back I saw someone's back-of-the-envelope calculation which suggested that Portal pulls in a horrendous amount of money, at least 6 figures, probably 7 and possibly 8. Again, you are arguing degree where you cannot even be sure of the scales on which you're standing, and you're ending up with the malignment of an organization which is entirely *innocent* due to its complete lack of presence on this network! How dare you?!? Ask them sometime: would CIS make an exception for Usenet, if they took it for themselves? Would they exclude it from their copyright claims and permit it to be re-displayed elsewhere? I doubt it. If anything, I fully suspect that if CIS did start taking Usenet stuff, it would only be a matter of time until *their attornies* started making threatening noises at us, and making all sorts of condescending remarks. Let's talk abuse of name. Really and truly. An entity which you cannot prove has any knowledge of anything you do has just had its name dragged into the mud by you for purported intention to cause you and others pain and difficulty. Just WHO is abusing WHOM, huh? I saw that BIX has a machine on Usenet (bixpb; cf. <20[03456]@bixpb>, mostly in news.* newsgroups; <200@bixpb> is their news.newsites announcement of existence), and one of their people said that they are intending to gateway certain things into BIX. Before you continue this baseless tirade against an organization which doesn't even know you exist, why don't you address your complaints in very explicit, specific form to this other entity which has actually published its intention to do precisely the things you fear? Look in news.misc, <205@bixpb>, and address your comments to bixpb!bensmith. I'd have to say stay clear of feeding commercial networks unless and until we, meaning the Usenet community, have full control of the output, and the There are some people who would like to have full control of the output of your mouth and keyboard. And they'd be more justified in their attack on you on the basis of what you've said/written than you are in your attacks on the still-innocent CompuServe. terms are to our liking. *Their* reward is in the money they hustle from their bozo users. *Our* reward is in seeing the results of our collective efforts each day. Unless we write the terms, then there should be no terms. [a] There's that "we" and "our" nonsense again. [b] A little *ad hominem* against CServe users never hurt anyone, did it? [c] A little *ad hominem* about commercial entities "hustling" their income never hurt, either, huh? Jeesh! --Karl PS- I have absolutely, positively no commercial affiliation with CompuServe. I was, for most of a year, the original technical sysop on its UNIX Forum, a forum which I helped create and a position which I held as a volunteer - not paid. I gave it up when it became obvious that I could not dedicate the time to serve its users properly. I also am working to the completion of an Internet-CompuServe mail gateway, which again is a dollars-free effort on my part. However, many CompuServe employees are my friends, and whatever the technical and political foibles be that occur inside CompuServe, they do not deserve the extensive abuse which has been heaped upon them gratuitously from the Usenet.