Re: Anyone have a comprehensive list of sharks?

---------

Kent Landfield (Kent_Landfield@sterling.com)
Wed, 6 Apr 94 11:58:40 CDT

>
> In the course of the conversation, he mentioned that
> "lots" of publishers have just gone and taken
> stuff off USENET and slapped it on their disks.
>
> Does anyone have a list of publishers
> that have Internet CD-ROM titles out? The attitude of the
> person on the phone, while definitely not arrogant,
> seemed confident that the "scoop" approach, (scooping
> stuff off USENET) was not, in the least, a questionable
> activity.
>
> Please, I don't want to start another flamewar on this topic.
>
> I'd just like to know if anyone's been keeping track of
> titles and publishers, or knows if and where a list is being kept.
>

As one of the original people to produce disks of USENET material

NetGems Issue 1
NetGems Issue 2
42 NetNews/CD with dumps of usenet news

I think I can add a bit here. I too do not want to have the discussion
fall into a flame war. With that said... We had high priced legal counsel
who knows USENET and intellectual property say that as long as it was sold
as a collection such as an archive or newsfeed then there was no problem,
legally. Dealing with a few on the net was more of a problem. And those
who complained had never contributed anything to the net that appeared on
our archive disks although they may have posted an article to the net that
appeared on the NetNews/CDs. Also, not one of them was an FAQ author
either. :-) The costs of the disks was actually in the production and
assembly of the free content on that specific media. We (and I assume other
cdrom producers) are giving the content away for free but the costs of
putting that content onto a media is what is being charged for. CD-ROMs are
much more interactive and are faster than tape so they do add functionality.
People wanted the contents on that media. That is what we charged for, not
the contents.

I think that a list of CDs containing Internet related information would
quickly turn into a catalog. Realistically, producers are going to have to
start adding more value instead of just slapping the data on to a disk.
There are just too many "archive" type products available today.

PS: we are no longer producing CDs because the market is not as large as
you may think. How many data CDs have you personally paid for in the last 2
years ? Don't equate the profits with CDs made by the music industry with
those of the data industry. It just doesn't amount to as much as people
think...
-Kent+

-- 
Kent Landfield                        INTERNET: kent_landfield@sterling.com
Sterling Software                     UUCP:     uunet!kent || sparky!kent
Phone: (402) 291-8300                 FAX:     (402) 291-4362
Please send comp.sources.misc-related mail to kent@uunet.uu.net.

[ Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive | Search Mail Archive | Authors | Usenet ]
[ 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 ]

---------

faq-admin@landfield.com

© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved