Forum Moderators: open
In what sense do you mean:
1, Google owns the copyright?
2, Google owns the company?
this may have some relevance to your question:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - February 12, 2001 - Google Inc. today announced that it has acquired Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service. This acquisition provides Google with Deja's entire Usenet archive (dating back to 1995), software, domain names including deja.com and dejanews.com, company trademarks, and other intellectual property. Financial terms of this transaction were not released
[google.com...]
Shak
MUCH OF THE CONTENT OF THE GROUPS--INCLUDING THE CONTENTS OF SPECIFIC POSTINGS--IS PROVIDED BY AND IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PERSON POSTING IN THAT GROUP. GOOGLE DOES NOT MONITOR THE CONTENT OF THE GROUPS AND TAKES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR SUCH CONTENT. INSTEAD, GOOGLE MERELY PROVIDES ACCESS TO SUCH CONTENT AS A SERVICE TO YOU.
[edited by: Shak at 10:26 pm (utc) on May 17, 2003]
For those who don't get the above, the putative owner of Usenet by tradition is said to be Fluffy the Cat. Usenet is a decentalized network where posts are distributed in thousands of different newsgroups. Thus, Usenet has no actual owner, much in the same way the Internet itself isn't owned by one company. Usenet humor is to make references to Fluffy as being the one in charge, and to refer to Usenet as the land of Fluffy, under his benevolent rulership.
As for ownership of posts, theoretically the poster owns the copyright. However, Usenet posts are like printing up flyers and shoving them under people's doors. Once in the wild, basically anyone can do with them what the want.
I know they dont own all of usenet. I still dont know how you could post if they dont own those groups.
The college that I work for opeates a newsgroup server (in fact I administer it) that carries many of the newsgroups that Google Groups carries. I can post to any of those groups via that server. But the college doesn't own those groups, any more than any of the owners of thousands of other newsgroup servers do. Neither does Google.
Yes. Google peers with a number of large text Usenet servers, and the posts go out to Usenet from the Google server through those.
Usenet servers aren't ordinarily accessible from the web. You usually need to read them with a newsreader which uses the NNTP protocol. If you check groups.google.com, robots.txt blocks all bots.
