Ungrouply sues Yahoo, and Google

A great addition to the debate is a new group called Ungrouply. This is a group of people who want three things. Primarily they want to act as a forum for people who wish to understand the issues around Grouply's service from a critical perspective. Secondly they don't want postings or scrapings from people such as myself, that is people advocating Grouply service. Finally they only want the truth. Given that membership is open to all, and that the debate will be controlled to be one-sided then I fear the truth will be difficult to stick to. All I can say is I wish them luck.

What I really want to talk about is what their position is on copyright. On their home page they state:

"Membership here is open to all without moderator approval. Our message archive is set for public viewing. You can share links to messages here. New members are moderated. All content of postings here are COPYRIGHTED by their authors. If you quote a posting found here, you must provide attribution to the source by including a link to the original message here. Copyright violators, spammers, abusers, etc. will be subject to prosecution."

So you see the contradiction? Public viewing...copyright...prosecution.

They are opening themselves up to BIG problems here. Firstly any group whose archives are PUBLIC will be swallowed whole by search engines like Google. Any public yahoo group has a built-in RSS feed and will be syndicated round the web faster than you can boil a kettle of water.

So right off they have to sue Google, Yahoo and all the other search engine companies. Not only that they have to start addressing all the syndication websites and tools, any one of which could display their posts in part or whole. None of these will care two hoots for any statements on the home page about copyright.

It potentially gets even worse for the group owners. Suppose a member posts something which ends up being "scraped" (their word) onto another website. The question is who does the suing? Is it the group owner or the copyright owner?

It gets worse for the group owners since I would argue the group owners are now liable for any copyright infringement incurred by any member. So if the group owner does not protect such copyright then they themselves are fully culpable, especially since they state so clearly on the home page their legal position on copyright. When I say culpable I am saying that each and every poster could sue them for aiding and abetting copyright infringement.

Of course, none of this is going to happen. No member or owner of Ungrouply is going to be silly enough to sue Google, are they?

But of course what they are saying is that they are happy to sue Grouply. And that's the truth.
Now just suppose someone posts, and that copyright is violated then are the group owners and moderators saying that they will themselves incur the legal costs? Or are they saying that they are imposing obligations on each member to incur those costs?

Supposing someone's copyright was broken, then Perhaps an errant member could now sue the owners for not suing someone else