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Originally Posted by SmokeyTheBear
if they counted on drab usenet content re-posted for the last 10 years they would be broke.. Guba only survives because an organized band of thieves constantly uploads stolen content for the sole purpose of making a market of "accessing" it.
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I'm not trying to restart the GUBA wars, but this common viewpoint is in fact just plain wrong. There's a *huge* universe of material on GUBA that's unique and converts precisely because there's nobody currently selling it. Virtually all of my GUBA marketing surrounds pictures I found that aren't available anywhere else on the net, for any price. And that's precisely why my surfers whip out their credit cards.
My biggest GUBA sales comes from vintage erotic photography -- those old "French" postcards and black-and-white wallet photos dating from about 1890 through 1965 or so. The earliest stuff is genuinely free of copyright. More recent stuff must belong to somebody, but the rightsholder was often somebody like a mail-order pornographer operating under an assumed name out of the back of a magazine. He died in 1972 and he kept his business a secret from his family, so his heirs never knew about the rights they inherited. That stuff is *dead* to the market, it's *impossible* to license and publish. But obsessive collectors and afficionados swap it on UseNet, and folks will pay for GUBA to help them find it.
GUBA's huge, and so perhaps there do exist folks who are abusing it precisely as Smokey alleges. But it's just flat
wrong to say that's the soul of GUBA's business model. I sell GUBA because GUBA exposes for non-technical users a huge universe of orphan content, stuff that's lost to the market, stuff that nobody's currently selling and nobody currently can sell.
Whomever is right about the legalities (and my opinion on them is well known), it's important to understand that GUBA is a lot bigger than the universe of recently-produced content by folks active in today's pornography market.
(The rules I established during the last round of GUBA wars remain in effect -- if you want to argue or discuss with me, keep it civil and polite. If your post is the usual GFY golconda of insult, abuse, and
ad hominem, I'll most likely ignore it.)