[Gilby]

Originally posted by Dmitriy
I wonder what are the legal issues of copying posts from public newsgroups and posting them on your own website.

Google is doing the exact same thing at http://groups.google.com/ but does it mean that we can do the same thing too or does google have permissions from all the newsgroups that they allow browser-based access to?

When someone posts to a usenet newsgroup, they know that it is going all over the internet and is being distributed, archived, and read by others. Making a web based interface to access the content is simply like someone using a client to access the content, and is also like another newsgroup server getting a feed from another usenet server.

When the posts are imported into the forums or are on google groups, the content is referenced as to who the author is of that content, just like you would have citations in a paper or publication that you'd write. Since it is properly cited, it does not violate any copyright laws.