gas for the FAQ fire.

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David Barr (barr@pop.psu.edu)
Wed, 06 Apr 1994 15:46:31 -0400

Are FAQ maintainers now going to go after any commercial
Internet site that sells access to Usenet?
I would argue that each and every Usenet server is a local
"publisher". These "News on CD's" and even "FAQ's on CD's" (which
are just a subset of Usenet articles), could be argued to be just
an alternate form of the existing distribution methods currently
employed by usenet.
As long as the FAQ's are kept in their original file format as
sent out over Usenet, I find it hard to argue how publishing a CD
containing Usenet articles any different than Mom&PopBBS selling
accounts for purposes of reading Usenet.

It's hard to find a true analogy in the "Real" world, since
electronic publishing is very different than paper publishing.
And Usenet is a rather bizarre form of publishing. I can't think of
another form of publishing whereby you simply toss bits across the
ether and have local copies of all those bits. In theory, a CD
of FAQ's is just a news server with an infinite expire time, and
selling CD's is just selling access to your news server, much
like an Internet service provider does.

This flame-fest should probably be moved to news.admin.policy -
I hereby release this e-mail to the public domain so you can repost
this message there to retain context.

--Dave

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