Usenet's new home

For Usenet fans, the ongoing downslide of Deja.com has been slow and agonizing. Deja.com -- once known as Dejanews -- was the much beloved company that had archived Usenet back to 1995 and was making it available via an easy-to-use Web search interface. But in the face of financial difficulties, Deja.com decided to reinvent itself as a kind of consumer reports service and promptly ditched the archive, much to the dismay of Net historians, researchers and other social creatures.

Now, Google has stepped in to reinstate the archive. On Monday, the beloved search engine announced that it had acquired Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service, along with an archive of more than 500 million messages going all the way back to 1995 (a terabyte of information, according to Google).

On its new Usenet page, Google vows to keep the resource alive: "Since reaching agreement with Deja, Google has been working nonstop to ensure access remains available to the largest archive of newsgroups on the net." Although no one can post messages at the moment, as the service is being revised, you can still browse the Usenet archives. Consider it yet another chance to revisit that flame war you had in 1996 on rec.pets.chihuahua; the Net's memory is long after all. -- Janelle Brown [2:15 p.m. PST, Feb. 12, 2001]

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Affiliation -- a new union tactic for the new economy

A few days ago we bemoaned the dot-com impossibility of one of the oldest and most traditional forms of union protest: the picket line. At first glance, it appeared that online merchandising was inherently hostile to in-the-flesh union organizing. But then one of our readers, Peter O'Neill, wrote in to tell us of how one union is making the Web work for it.

After almost two years of negotiation and protest, the workers at Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., finally signed a contract with the store. And in that contract, they included a clever thing: They set up their own Web site as a Powells.com "affiliate site." As an affiliate, the union gets a cut of every book-buying transaction brokered by its site -- Powellsunion.com. So now, whenever someone buys a copy of, say, Irving Howe's "Socialism in America" via Powellsunion.com, he or she is actually making a financial contribution to the union cause.

The system isn't perfect. Since Powell's only holds affiliate programs with organizations it likes, it's unlikely it would set one up with a union unless its hand was forced. So a union has to be successful enough to get to the bargaining table before it can even consider such an option. In contrast, Amazon workers who are trying to organize a union in the first place might be considered unlikely to gain affiliate status.

Furthermore, according to law, companies can't give money to the unions of which their workers are members. This means that the 10 percent cut goes not to the union, but to the individual union members. And according to the terms of the deal, Powell's won't pay up until $100,000 worth of merchandise has been sold through the union site. The 10 percent cut of that won't be peanuts, but it means that after five months of the deal, Powellsunion.com still hasn't seen a penny.

Still, dot-com unions take note: It's a new form of union bargaining for a new kind of marketplace. -- Amy Standen [4:15 p.m. PST, Feb. 9, 2001]

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Napster users' last chance?

Quick, go to Napster now! Download that Aimee Mann song! Grab some "Kid A"! Or else, come next week, your song-swapping days may be over.

That's right, the long-awaited Napster opinion is on the way. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit will issue its song-swapping decision on Monday, at about 11 a.m. The three-judge panel may uphold the District Court's injunction, which aimed to make Napster find a way to filter out copyrighted music or shut down the service. The court could also enforce the injunction but limit its scope, giving Napster more time to remove copyrighted files, for example. Or the court could overturn the injunction entirely, letting Napster and its 40 million users continue swapping songs.

Regardless, the case will be nowhere near over. Both sides could appeal to the Supreme Court, and if they don't, Napster and the five labels that initiated the lawsuit last year will duke it out once again in front of Marilyn Hall Patel, the judge who issued the original injunction.

But with the decision only a few days away, there's at least one certainty: Napster's servers will be busy -- very busy. -- Damien Cave [1:15 p.m. PST, Feb. 9, 2001]

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Alas, IUMA -- the dot-com downturn claims another victim

The news that one of the Web's first music sites, the Internet Underground Music Archive, may soon be closing down is a harsh and unwanted reminder that the dot-com downturn is killing off more than just a bunch of bad dot-com businesses. It's also killing off the indie projects that made the Net cool in the first place.

Sites like IUMA or Blogger always existed more for love than money. But they now face the same kind of cruel reality that every also-ran e-commerce Web site is confronting. And while it might be comforting to believe that the Web wipe-out will confine itself just to annihilating those pathetic dot-coms that never had a real reason to exist, the sad truth is the downturn is also victimizing the really neat sites that just got too popular and too big to function without commercial support.

IUMA symbolized many of the Net's earliest dreams -- the idea that the middleman between artists and fans could be cut out of the equation and the hope that small, independent bands could thrive without becoming megastars. Each time an IUMA bites the dust, another dream dies. --Katharine Mieszkowski [3:30 p.m. PST, Feb. 8, 2001]

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