Three courts have now split the same question the same way — what you do with a file may be fair use, but how you got it, and whether you handed it on, is the liability. That makes transport the whole question, and it is the most flattering thing that has ever happened to Usenet architecture.
Retention is the number every provider leads with, and it has quietly become the least useful spec in the market. It measures the age of the oldest article, not how much of the old feed survived — and it is a property of the backbone, not the brand you bought it from.
Retention gets all the attention, but the legal regime a backbone runs under quietly decides which articles vanish. The same NZB loses different parts on a DMCA feed than on an NTD one — and that gap is the whole case for diversity.
The market looks like dozens of independent providers. It collapses to about six backbones. Knowing which brand sits on which feed is the difference between real redundancy and paying twice for the same articles.
A new blog about Usenet, NZB indexers, and digital privacy — written for people who already live in the space.
