Originally Posted by SilentKnight

But that's not the issue here. Sure, we've used usenet ourselves over the years for promotion. We've routinely written off a percentage of new photoshoots as 'advertising and promotion' (by 'written off' I mean to say that we consider the images devalued because we've made them freely available to everyone).

But what many of us are talking about here isn't our own promotion - its the flooding of newsgroups by people who steal massive quantities of our content, making it freely available - and thus providing the opportunity for Guba to suck it up and not only turn themselves a profit...but also potentially keep people from visiting OUR site to see the content.

Over the years I've seen many fellow BDSM and fetish colleagues have their entire sites posted on newsgroups such as ABPEB (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bondage) - and heard them moan about the related losses.

One of the worst aspects concerning Guba is the fact that although most usenet servers have a comparatively short posting retention (usually a max. of a few days on busy newsgroups) - the pilfered content on Guba stays there long-term - thus providing continued exposure to surfers who might have otherwise missed it on Usenet.