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by dn3500 949 days ago
Yes, the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive. It was on IA for a while but has been forced underground for legal reasons. You can still find copies pretty easily.

https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive

4 comments

Reason for removal in case anyone was wondering:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_a...

I'm fascinated by the idea that you could try to take down your own Usenet posts based on the idea that you have copyright over them.

Surely there must be some law or legal precedent that in the act of posting to a public forum, you inherently "license" that content to be freely reproduced, at a minimum for non-commercial purposes as part of distribution in the context of the forum? (But nobody can correct your posts and sell them as a book though.)

I'm wondering if IA gave up because they thought they would lose, or it would be too expensive to go to court in the first place.

I actually gave this advice to a woman recently who was trying to get her images removed from Reddit. They weren't sexual enough for Reddit to remove the images her ex was posting, so I told her to just DMCA them all. Not ideal, but there you have it.
> I'm fascinated by the idea that you could try to take down your own Usenet posts based on the idea that you have copyright over them.

One does not simply walk into the Poetry newsgroups. Their strophes are guarded by more than just X-No-Archive message headers. There is evil there that does not sleep, and the grey-locked troll hunters are ever watchful ...

Most interpretations of the GDPR in Europe allow anyone to remove/anonymize anything they have written and published online.
Which legal reasons?

Is there a monopoly over Usenet archives, or is it someone arguing about their own posts only?

I would believe it is wrong for someone to have copyright over what's basically distributed public forums.

This is sad.

Also, that's how the law works :/

Do we know what messages were the bone of contention? Don't tell me this isn't common knowledge among dozens of people at least...
Yep, but that's begging the question :)
Is there a Torrent of that somewhere so we can keep it alive?
Magnet link here.. I just tested it and downloaded the whole 1.6GB in about 2 seconds:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i2btuu/utzoo_a...

There's a .torrent file listed under

https://archive.org/download/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive/

but I've not [yet] looked at it...

""" In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a set of messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted, and to avoid further costs and accusations of manipulation should those demands be met, the archive has been removed from this URL and is not currently accessible to the public.

Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have original materials. """

Unfortunately that only contains the index ('listing.txt') and not the content
Here's a search engine for the archive:

https://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com/altavista