How long will Newsgroups last

[Skiz]

Read here - http://www.ecos.sourceware.org/ml/au.../msg00420.html

I don't get what that has to do with anything.

I covers legal liability of archives maintainers. That has everything to do with whether they "cannot be closed down by anyone".

[djkemp1]

so does this mean tyhey cannot be closed down or they can??

[wickedsick]

so does this mean tyhey cannot be closed down or they can??

what do u think?

[Broken]

so does this mean tyhey cannot be closed down or they can??

what do u think?

Usenet will be here tonight, tomorrow, and probably until the Internet becomes so warped that it won't be worth having.
And yes, I believe that day is only a few years off.

[Daniel]

One has to see the Usenet for what it was and still it below the surface of binary groups. Textgroups are a wealth of information and on a large number of topics I've experienced advantages to other ways of discussion/support (like web forums, mailing lists) because the Usenet has always had the most competent crowd.

With that hanging over the Usenet, shutting it down will not be in the interest of any industry. What can be done is what ISP's already do for their customers as they mostly offer Usenet access but don't list binary groups. What's left is completely legal content of thousands of posts per month.

But even if some Usenet access providers would consent to limiting their access to text groups (the largest ones in terms of number of posted messages/day are after all the large binary providers like usenetserver, giganews, newshosting, tweaknews, eweka, astraweb etc), that still would not bring the binary groups down. There are currently over 6000 usenet servers (so says Wikipedia anyway) and a good Usenet access provider should have direct infeeds from at least 50-100 other servers. Affecting all of them is hardly possible as they're likely to be all over the world.

[djkemp1]

Usenet will be here tonight, tomorrow, and probably until the Internet becomes so warped that it won't be worth having.
And yes, I believe that day is only a few years off.

why do you think and how do you think the internet will become 'warped'?

[Brenya]

Newsgroups will end when all forms of digital media ceases to be copyrighted. Isn't it obvious? Newsgroups are only viable because it is a safe haven for pirates.

The features of newsgroups, rather than that of other modes of file sharing (eg. bittorrent), incentivizes pirates with safety from anti-p2p sniffers; this incentive outweighs their slim monthly fee to users of newsgroups. However, if pirates should not need safety from the government, the newsgroups will not be worth the money.

(I intentionally left out the fact that newsgroups do not require you to upload. The reason is that once copyright infringement becomes essentially nonexistent, public trackers such as thepiratebay or demonoid will grow exponentially; so the aforementioned incentive is negligible.)

So when digital media can no longer be copyrighted, only then will newsgroups die out.