Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!bu-cs!buengc!ho
From: ho@buengc.BU.EDU (Yue-shun E. Ho)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Plagiarism?
Message-ID: <2938@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 23 May 89 05:46:16 GMT
Reply-To: ho@buengc.UUCP (Yue-shun E. Ho)
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 14

It occurs to me that a certain mailing group is publishing selected Usenet
  articles in their digests without the authorizations from the original
  posters, although the name of the newsgroup and those of the authors
  are mentioned.  I wonder if this is acceptable and/or legal.  Are Usenet
  articles copyrighted in any way?

I questioned one person who does this about its legalities through e-mail.
  He explained that this is justifiable because (1) the information in
  the articles are important and urgent; (2) the newsgroup which he extracts
  articles from is open to the public; (3) he could simply strip off the
  msg titles and pretend that he wrote all that; (4) he believe that the
  news posters want the news spreaded out as wide as possible "because
  of <1>.  In case this is not so, it doesn't matter anyway because <3>
  will override it."