Ha, I'm sorry I reacted that cryptically, I owe you an explanation.
It has absolutely nothing to do with piracy or any "legal" issue. I'm just sad to discover what Usenet has become. I thought it was dead, I guess now I wish it was :-/
Usenet is an extremely old network. According to
Wikipedia it exists since 1980. That's over a decade older than the WWW.
You can think of Usenet as the first ever internet forum. It was similar to what we have here on Lebgeeks in many aspects, except you did not read it with a web browser (like I said, the web did not exist back then). Usenet was the first collective effort to document human knowledge (as well as a lot of stupid crap, you know how the Internet works) in a single place. Some of
the earliest memes to ever exist
started on Usenet. If we were in the 80s up to mid 90s, we'd all be using it right now.
Last thing I heard was that Google bought all the Usenet archives up until early 2000s and dumped them in Google Groups. I thought this was the end.
Finding out that a bunch of kids are using the remains of the network to share "doubtful" files, not to mention making users pay a fee for access, surprised me, not in a good way. I guess I'm just sentimental...