Digital BW, The Print

>This list is 
> primarily educational and commentary oriented.  Only the YAHOO! 
> component is commercial. Issues of how the end-user uses the 
information 
> are unimportant BTW.
> 
> Keith Krebs

This is not a legal opinion, but I have to strongly disagree with 
you, Keith, that the "educational and commentary oriented" content of 
the Yahoo! websites can be separated from the commercial message: 
wrapping the content with commerce effectively makes the content part 
of the commercial package. 

It is exactly like a magazine or newspaper: without the content how 
much would the advertising space be worth? A whole lot less! is the 
answer; the content is the ONLY reason many, if not most, of us are 
here. Would you pay for and read every single advertising flyer that 
is thrown your way, if it wasn't attached to something of value? 
Imagine a magazine without the articles or with the articles 
segregated from the ads, so that you could easily avoid looking at 
the ads. The value of such a magazine would be rather less than the 
mixed content version we have now.

I, for one, resent this commodifying of my personal communications 
for the purpose of Yahoo! profits (which retrun nothing to me, but 
which waste web resources, take up bandwidth and slow my perusal of 
the content). Newsgroups accomplished the same goal before the medium 
was commercialized, despite the more complex functionality Yahoo! has 
added.

Frank